The Penetration of Technocratic Logic into the Educational Field: Rationalizing Schooling from the Progressives to the Present

Educational accountability is not a recent invention. Over the course of the 20th century, there were three major movements demanding accountability in American education: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era, the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control. This impulse to rationalize schools cannot be explained by interest group or partisan explanations, as those that have purveyed the reforms defy easy ideological generalization. Instead, these reforms can be understood as a process of penetration of a “technocratic logic” into the educational sphere. In each case, this process exhibited a similar pattern: 1) the creation of a crisis of quality which destabilized the existing educational status quo; 2) the elevation of a technocratic logic, backed by the knowledge base of a high status epistemic community; 3) the rallying of ideologically diverse powerful actors external to the schools behind a commensurating logic that promised control and improvement over an unwieldy school system; and 4) the inability of the education field to resist (and often to be co-opted by) this technocratic logic, due to its historical institutionalization as a highly feminized, weak, bureaucratically-administered field lacking its own set of widely respected countervailing professional standards. Implications suggest that unless teachers are able to develop and organize themselves as a stronger field, they will remain at the whim of external actors; professionalization may also produce better outcomes than the repeated emphasis on rationalizing reforms

Why Reform Sometimes Succeeds: Understanding the Conditions That Produce Reforms That Last

Counter to narratives of persistently failed school reform, we argue that reforms sometimes succeed, and seek to understand why. Drawing on examples from the founding of public schools to the present, we find that successful system-wide reforms addressed problems that teachers thought they had, by being consistent with prevailing norms and values, by mobilizing a significant public constituency, and building the needed educational infrastructure. We distinguish between system-wide and niche reforms, suggesting that some--particularly those seeking ambitious instruction—failed system-wide but succeeded by creating protected educational niches. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for the Common Core

Magnetic switching in granular FePt layers promoted by near-field laser enhancement

Light-matter interaction at the nanoscale in magnetic materials is a topic of intense research in view of potential applications in next-generation high-density magnetic recording. Laser-assisted switching provides a pathway for overcoming the material constraints of high-anisotropy and high-packing density media, though much about the dynamics of the switching process remains unexplored. We use ultrafast small-angle x-ray scattering at an x-ray free-electron laser to probe the magnetic switching dynamics of FePt nanoparticles embedded in a carbon matrix following excitation by an optical femtosecond laser pulse. We observe that the combination of laser excitation and applied static magnetic field, one order of magnitude smaller than the coercive field, can overcome the magnetic anisotropy barrier between "up" and "down" magnetization, enabling magnetization switching. This magnetic switching is found to be inhomogeneous throughout the material, with some individual FePt nanoparticles neither switching nor demagnetizing. The origin of this behavior is identified as the near-field modification of the incident laser radiation around FePt nanoparticles. The fraction of not-switching nanoparticles is influenced by the heat flow between FePt and a heat-sink layer

Performance of the CMS Cathode Strip Chambers with Cosmic Rays

The Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) constitute the primary muon tracking device in the CMS endcaps. Their performance has been evaluated using data taken during a cosmic ray run in fall 2008. Measured noise levels are low, with the number of noisy channels well below 1%. Coordinate resolution was measured for all types of chambers, and fall in the range 47 microns to 243 microns. The efficiencies for local charged track triggers, for hit and for segments reconstruction were measured, and are above 99%. The timing resolution per layer is approximately 5 ns

Stimulated resonant inelastic X-ray scattering in a solid

When materials are exposed to X-ray pulses with sufficiently high intensity, various nonlinear effects can occur. The most fundamental one consists of stimulated electronic decays after resonant absorption of X-rays. Such stimulated decays enhance the number of emitted photons and the emission direction is confined to that of the stimulating incident photons which clone themselves in the process. Here we report the observation of stimulated resonant elastic (REXS) and inelastic (RIXS) X-ray scattering near the cobalt L3 edge in solid Co/Pd multilayer samples. We observe an enhancement of order 106 of the stimulated over the conventional spontaneous RIXS signal into the small acceptance angle of the RIXS spectrometer. We also find that in solids both stimulated REXS and RIXS spectra contain contributions from inelastic electron scattering processes, even for ultrashort 5 fs pulses. Our results reveal the potential and caveats of the development of stimulated RIXS in condensed matter