People who are experts in policy areas, but attempt to write for a broader audience in their home discipline, often write primarily a policy tract, then add a little something from their home field. Although Lorraine McDonnell is one of the top experts in the country on education policy, especially large-scale educational reform, she has written this book truly from the perspective of political science. In her career, she has written many other articles and books concentrating on policy issues and evaluations, but Politics, Persuasion, and Educational Testing is set within the discourse of policy theory and focuses on the politics of educational standards, assessment, and testing.

Although the original data go back to the 1990s in Kentucky, North Carolina, and California, the implications of this book for the current controversies over the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation are significant. NCLB represents the most important national education legislation since the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in1965. The author relegates that discussion to the last chapter, but the political lessons learned for both designing policy instruments and implementing and reforming legislation once it is enacted is one of the many reasons for recommending this book.

Following a somewhat confusing opening section in which the central arguments are presented, the writing and analysis become crystal clear. Chapter 2 presents an excellent and nuanced description of the literature on varying types of policy instruments. McDonnell places educational standards and assessment policy in the category of hortatory policy instruments for which information, values and beliefs, and persuasion are the principal policy levers to induce requisite behavior in the policy “targets.” A parallel example would be food labels to induce nutrition in consumers. She contrasts this type of policy instrument with mandates, inducement systems, capacity building, or major system change.

One of the author's main arguments for why educational standards and assessment should be thought of in terms of persuasion through information and changing beliefs is that education is a process that depends on what happens in classrooms; classrooms have often defied external efforts to change behavior using other methods. That argument faces the reality that the “target” of reform is ultimately teachers. And they may well have considerable autonomy and protections, and thus mandatory policies or inducements may simply not work very well to produce reform.

What is important in this book for advancing the hortatory theory is that McDonnell also carefully lays out the necessary causal assumptions for the policy instrument to work. These include requirements that information be clearly understood, that underlying values be broadly accepted, that there must be sufficient incentives and capacity to change, and that responses must be consistent with the basic policy goals. What this belies, and what she acknowledges, is that the hortatory approach will not work well by itself in education reform. At the very least, it must be combined with inducements and capacity. She also argues that while not absolutely necessary, the best chance for success will occur when costs are low and the hortatory approach is linked to and reinforced by other policy instruments.

Following the chapter on policy theory are three detailed chapters on the politics of enacting and implementing standards and assessment systems, first at the state and then at the local level. Because the three states were early entrants into what is now required of all states by NCLB, their policy histories are particularly relevant for what has happened since at the national level.

At the state level in all states, there was a degree of resistance and change, with the most dramatic changes coming through the tumultuous school politics in California. Also in all three states, there was a general shift from a policy of inducements, with relatively low stakes, to a mandatory policy regime that attached high stakes to both schools (failing school sanctions and successful school rewards) and students (graduation test requirements, retention in grade). In some states, there were also proposals to reward teachers on the basis of individual student performances on standardized tests in each classroom.

The detailed state-level case studies are followed in Chapters 4 and 5 by analysis of implementation problems and controversies in districts and then schools. In each of the California districts studied, significant opposition arose from parents and external groups. The issues ranged from confusion over the purpose and content of the tests to parent and student beliefs that the tests personally probed family situations. Although there was also support by parents in these districts, the depth of opposition will never be known because the state terminated the test and assessment system for five years after a brief introduction.

Chapter 5 addresses the important topic of whether these standards and assessment systems actually produce changes in what teachers do in the classroom. Although the results of McDonnell's research and the research of others that she reviews do indicate that some teachers reform their behavior in accord with the standards and testing processes in all three states, the results are at best mixed. And the methods are suspect. There are few “change studies,” for instance, observing classroom behavior prior to imposition of standards and then after. And the observational data that do exist show weaker degrees of behavioral conformity to the new approaches than survey studies that ask teachers if they had changed. And all of this is highly subject to Hawthorne or experimenter effects in that the teachers probably well understood what conforming behavior would be. This is a critical area of future research because now all 50 states must be engaged in the type of transformation envisioned in these three states. And one suspects that what McDonnell and her colleagues found—that professional development with regard to the new systems was sparse at best—will be even more true of states and districts not as well prepared or as self-motivated to comply.

The final chapter provides lessons learned and describes what is necessary for the standards and assessment approach to be successfully implemented. I read the list as much harder to accomplish than McDonnell does, but I encourage the readers to make their own judgments. The chapter also includes a discussion of what must be accomplished to make a hortatory policy instrument succeed. Here I part company with McDonnell because I have never thought about the standards and assessment reforms as anything like a hortatory regime. As it has developed, in these states and certainly in NCLB, it appears to me as much more like a command-and-control mandatory system, with inducement and sanctions attached. It is not simply providing information and discussing values, as one would in encouraging healthy eating and providing food labels with the percent of daily salt intake. This conclusion may be tainted because I am applying a retrospective focus to a book about the beginning of a reform movement. But in the year 2004, the standards and assessment movement hardly looks like a mildly persuasive policy instrument. So perhaps one of my strongest conclusions is that people interested in both the politics of education and education reform should read this book for relevance on what is happening today in 14,000 school districts across the country.