The Institutional Role of State Education Departments: A Historical Perspective

Since the early 1980s, the prevailing school reform strategy among states has been toward more centralized and more encompassing legislative and administrative controls. As reformers increasingly expect states to carry the burden of school improvement, such expectations have, in turn, shifted attention to states' administrative capacities to effect change. While state education departments should, and in some instances do, play an important part in the educational reform process, little is known about their capacities to effect large-scale and enduring change. Unlike European countries, the United States did not develop differentiated, centralized bureaucracies with direct authority and control over education. While specific configurations of control have differed over the past 150 years, the role of state education departments always has been contingent. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were defined by elite professional interests and in the second half by an array of special interests. This article examines the role of state education departments from their nineteenth-century origins by tracing the development of state administrative authority in education and the political forces that have shaped it. A central question that the article poses is whether large-scale educational reform is sustainable in the absence of an institutional center to shape policy, aggregate interests, and control and channel conflict. The first part of the article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding state education departments as political institutions. The second part examines the historical developments of state administrative bureaucracies. The final part of the article integrates the historical and theoretical to suggest an analytic framework for understanding the institutional role of state education departments.