Political cultures in education: Emerging perspectives

INTRODUCTION In 2008 we published a chapter in the first edition of this handbook that examined how political culture affects the development of K-12 educational policies at state and local levels. In that analysis, we focused on how the expanding role of the state as a key actor in educational policy has increased over the past few decades (Clune, 1987; Reeves, 1990; Timar & Kirp, 1988), and included data about how local districts and schools reacted to state policies. Since then we have expanded our examination of political cultures, considering additional in-depth analysis of states within the United States, differences between countries within the European Union, and some of the differences between the K-12 and higher education sectors. This chapter therefore represents both a deepening and an extension of the ideas developed in the previous contribution, but with a stronger focus on state and national political cultures.