A Decade of Promises: Discourses on Twenty-first-Century Schools in Library Policy and Research

Prior to the mid-1970s, policy simply meant planning. Over time, policy studies have shifted from predominantly empirical approaches to more diverse methods emanating from postmodern and critical perspectives. More recently, the themes of equity, school choice, and social background (rather than meritocracy) have mixed with current discourses of centralization/decentralization, diversity/ uniformity, and curriculum standardization in policy debate. The knowledge base of information technologies and resources held by school librarians can play a positive role in establishing successful policy frameworks for technology planning and implementation at school and district levels. Honest differences of views and honest debate are not disunity. They are the vital process of policy making among free men. —Herbert Clark Hoover In a review of the effects of policy making on the expansion of school technology, Zhao and Lei (2009) showed that despite the contradictory and weak research evidence that technology enhances student learning, policy makers’ “enthusiasm over technology remains unwavering” (p. 675). They go on to suggest that it is symbolic value rather than use value that plays a central role in school decision making about bringing in the latest and greatest new digital innovation, thus raising status and maintaining the appearance of progress. Further, the rapid development of new technologies and the complexity of the environments into which they are introduced bring unintended consequences. Such technological innovation requires adaptation and evolution throughout the school sysA Decade of Promises: Discourses on Twenty-firstCentury Schools in Library Policy and Research Ellen S. Hoffman and Marcia A. Mardis LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 58, No. 1, Summer 2009 (“Important to Us All: School Libraries and LIS Research,” edited by Marcia A. Mardis), pp. 109–120 © 2009 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 110 library trends/summer 2009 tem, from pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment to school organization and human infrastructure. This was echoed by a Canadian study (Jenson, Lewis, Smith, & Brushwood Rose, 2007), in which the authors found that policies were intended to “map, steer, and facilitate institutional change in light of the promise of a technological economic revolution,” but these policies were often poorly thought out, were based on simplistic views of what an information revolution would mean, and were “driven by action oriented bureaucracy and technology promoters” (p.7). They argued in such cases, the cart often drives the horse. Honig (2006) differentiates implementable policy from successful policy, with the latter not assured by the former. As she notes, “implementability and success are the product of interactions between policies, people, and places—the demands specific policies place on implementers; the participants in implementation and their starting beliefs, knowledge, and other orientations toward policy demands; and the places or contexts that help shape what people can and will do” (p. 2). She proposes that a new generation of policy researchers is more focused on multiple dimensions and interactions than before and have shifted from worrying about universal truths to studying the variation that occurs among views about the parameters that have to be implemented if policy impacts are to be fully understood. “As ‘policy’ has assumed an increasingly pivotal role in the educational system, a growing number of scholars have turned their attention to the process through which rules and regulations are adopted, and the consequences they have on teaching and learning” (Sykes, Schneider, & Ford, 2009, p. 1). Such studies have shown varied approaches to policy research, including statistical modeling using large datasets of economics, case studies of organizational and classroom impacts of sociology and anthropology, and the critical studies approaches that focus on power relationships and uneven benefits. Floden (2007) notes that such studies are founded on differing philosophical approaches related to knowledge claims about causation, human motivation, and what will happen in the future. The concept of not only making policy but studying it is a fairly recent occurrence according to Zajda (2005), who writes that prior to the mid-1970s, policy simply meant planning. Over time policy studies have shifted from predominantly empirical approaches to more diverse methods emanating from postmodern and critical perspectives. More recently, the themes of equity, school choice, and social background (rather than meritocracy) have mixed with current discourses of centralization/decentralization, diversity/uniformity, and curriculum standardization in policy