A CURRICULAR POLICY FORTY YEARS IN THE MAKING: THE IMPLEMENTATION OF AN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY COURSE IN THE PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL DISTRICT
Open Access
- Author:
- Sanders, Felicia Charron
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Theory and Policy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 08, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Dana Lynn Mitra, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Dana Lynn Mitra, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
David Alexander Gamson, Committee Member
Kimberly Griffin, Committee Member
Emilie Smith, Committee Member - Keywords:
- policy evaluation
policy implementation
multicultural education
urban education - Abstract:
- African American students are among the lowest achieving minority groups in the United States public school system. Multicultural education literature argues that such a curriculum could help increase the academic achievement of Black students; however, there is very little evidence of this claim. In 2005, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission mandated that all high school students take a newly developed African American history (AAH) course as graduation requirement beginning with class of 2009, after 40 years of community request for such a course. Through a qualitative case study research approach, and using the theory of social construction of target populations (Schneider & Ingram, 1993) and a framework that explains common impediments to educational policy implementation (Shulman, 1983), this study seeks to examine why the District implemented the AAH course as a graduate requirement, how the District designed the course, and how the course was implemented by social studies teachers. The use of the theory of social construction of target populations provided a framework for understanding the decisions District administrators made in regards to requiring the course and how they designed the course. The findings from this portion of the study suggest that the District administrators’ goals for requiring the course focused on their social construction of Black youth, but the design of the course focused on the perceptions of teachers’ strengths and weaknesses. The administrators’ assessment of teachers’ capacities contributed to a disconnect between what teachers needed to teach the course and what they were provided. Lee Shulman’s (1983) impediments to policy implementation provided a framework to examine and explain the challenges teachers experienced in implementing the curricular policy. This dissertation concludes that the Philadelphia community won a political victory in terms of the inclusion of the AAH course in the District’s curriculum. However, as a result of the disconnect between the administrators and teachers, the course was implemented poorly and cannot be considered an educational victory.