Institutional learning as a feedback practice

Lasswell framed the study of policy as problem-oriented. The emergence of problems and how problems are framed, constructed, and used tends to be taken for granted when studying policy design and implementation. This is especially evident in the language of education reform and the dominant neoliberal ethos of performance and competition. In the state of Louisiana in the U.S., education reform has developed through top-down, regulatory efforts, with primary focus on testing and upper-level performance. An under-investigated aspect of education reform is early childhood education and care policy. Policies promoting early childhood education marshal broad support thanks to studies purporting advantages later in life, but policy details such as resource constraints and agreement on standards complicate implementation. Act 3 of 2012 in Louisiana created a new regime for regulating early childhood care and education, unifying these activities in the state Department of Education (LDE). By 2015, the policy required full implementation. Our study considers two aspects of this implementation. First, we turn a critical eye toward the construction and definition of the policy problem in the legislation and, more importantly, in the department itself. Second, we investigate how the department “learns.” One of the important efforts in implementation of Act 3 in Louisiana was the use of pilots over three years, efforts intended to provide programmatic information as well as local, contextual needs. This was, in many respects, a classic attempt at policy laboratories. But, in relation to our first concern about problem representation, we want to learn how and what the agency “learned” through these efforts. Our inquiry considers the political dimension to learning. We try to explore the non-cognitive aspects that distinguish between knowledge and learning in the process of political doings. As agencies answer to the demand that they must implement a policy design, how do the actions reframe the design, and to what extent do such activities derive from the application of knowledge or from the implications of preconceived goals and ideologies?