GSE Colloquium Series in Politics, Governance, and Political Economy Education - Susan Moffitt

Revisiting Dewey's Problem: Building Administrative and Political Support for Educational Reform

Education reforms vacillate between seeing government operations as a source of the problem preventing students’ success—through burdensome paperwork or compliance procedures that prevent students from accessing services—and as a necessary part of the solution for school improvement—through staff expertise or rules that protect minoritized populations. The implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) reflects these perspectives of government operations as both a source of the problem and a necessary part of the solution.  As part of a broader project focused on reform through IDEA, this paper deploys a mixed-methods design to identify how governmental operations, including staff investments and compliance procedures, bear on public access to district policymaking spaces and information, including school board meetings and student support services. 

Susan Moffitt is the John Hazen White Professor of Public Policy and the Chair of the Political Science Department at Brown University.  Her research combines political science and public policy to explain barriers confronting policy development and implementation in public education. Her latest book, co-authored with Michaela O’Neill and David K. Cohen, is Reforming the Reform: Problems of Public Schooling in the American Welfare State (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She has published two other books: Making Policy Public: Participatory Bureaucracy in American Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools, co-authored with David K. Cohen (Harvard University Press in 2009). Some of her other scholarship has appeared in journals including the American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Politics; Perspectives on Politics; and American Journal of Education.  She has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and has been named the winner of the 2025 Herbert Simon Award for her contributions to the scientific study of bureaucracy by the Midwest Political Science Association.