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Education policy scholarship has long been pulled between two opposing views of its subject. On one side stands the conviction that policy is a rational, technical instrument for improving schools—a tool for fixing problems, allocating resources, and raising outcomes. On the other side is the insistence that policy is fundamentally about power: who gets to decide what education is for, whose knowledge counts, and how inequalities are reproduced or challenged. This tension—between policy as neutral management and policy as contested terrain—has driven the history of the field. Over the past seven decades, researchers have built, torn down, and rebuilt frameworks for understanding how education policy works, why it so often fails, and what it reveals about the societies that produce it.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the first systematic framework for studying education policy emerged from structural-functionalism. Drawing on the sociology of Talcott Parsons, this approach treated education systems as integrated parts of a stable social whole. Schools were understood to perform essential functions: sorting students into appropriate roles, transmitting shared values, and supplying the economy with trained workers. Policy, from this vantage point, was a matter of adjusting the machinery—improving efficiency, expanding access, and aligning schooling with labor market needs. Structural-functionalism gave the field its initial vocabulary and its first research agenda. It asked how education systems maintained social order and assumed that policy makers and researchers shared a common interest in making the system work better. The framework's blind spots, however, soon became impossible to ignore. It had little to say about conflict, inequality, or the possibility that schooling might serve some groups at the expense of others.
By the early 1970s, a wave of neo-Marxist and critical theory scholarship began to challenge the functionalist consensus directly. Drawing on the work of Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, these analysts argued that education policy was not a neutral tool but a mechanism for reproducing class inequality. Schools, they claimed, trained workers for capitalist labor markets, legitimized unequal outcomes as meritocratic, and deflected attention from structural exploitation. Neo-Marxist frameworks shifted the field's central question from "how does education maintain order?" to "how does education maintain domination?" This was a fundamental break. Where functionalism saw consensus, neo-Marxism saw conflict; where functionalism saw progress, neo-Marxism saw reproduction.
Feminist policy analysis emerged in the 1980s as both an extension of and a challenge to neo-Marxist critique. Feminist scholars agreed that policy was a site of power, but they insisted that gender was as central as class. They showed how education policies—from curriculum mandates to teacher pay scales to school discipline—reflected and reinforced patriarchal structures. Feminist analysis broadened the critical lens to include the gendered division of labor in schools, the marginalization of women's knowledge in official curricula, and the ways policy discourse itself assumed a male norm. It coexisted with neo-Marxist work while pushing the field to recognize that inequality is never just about economics. Feminist policy analysis remains an active tradition today, particularly in research on gender equity policies, sexual harassment in schools, and the feminization of teaching.
A third critical wave arrived in the mid-1980s with postmodern and poststructuralist critique. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, this framework questioned the very categories that earlier analysts had taken for granted. Poststructuralists argued that policy texts were not transparent statements of intent but discursive constructions that produced the problems they claimed to solve. The category "at-risk student," for example, did not describe a pre-existing reality; it brought a particular kind of student into being through policy language. Postmodern critique also rejected the grand narratives of both functionalism and Marxism, insisting that power operated through local, dispersed practices rather than through a single ruling class or state apparatus. This framework never became dominant in education policy studies, but it permanently altered how researchers read policy documents, attend to language, and question their own categories. Its influence is visible today in the discourse-analytic methods used within policy sociology and cultural-political economy.
By the 1990s, the field had grown fragmented. The critical turns had exposed the limits of functionalism, but they had not produced a unified alternative. Two new frameworks emerged that tried to explain policy patterns without abandoning either empirical rigor or attention to power.
Neoinstitutionalism, which rose to prominence in the 1990s, shifted attention away from local conflicts and toward the broader cultural environment in which education systems operate. Drawing on the work of John Meyer and Brian Rowan, neoinstitutionalists argued that schools around the world adopt similar structures—standardized curricula, formal credentials, bureaucratic management—not because those structures are efficient but because they are culturally legitimate. Education policy, in this view, is driven by global norms about what a modern school system should look like. Neoinstitutionalism offered a powerful explanation for why education reforms so often look alike across very different national contexts. It coexisted with critical frameworks by focusing on a different level of analysis: not class struggle or gender oppression, but the taken-for-granted cultural rules that shape policy makers' imaginations.
Policy sociology, which took shape in the mid-1990s, responded to a different set of frustrations. Its proponents—led by scholars such as Stephen Ball and Jenny Ozga—wanted to bring the state, the economy, and political actors back into the analysis without returning to functionalism. Policy sociology combined the critical sensibility of neo-Marxism with the empirical methods of mainstream policy studies. It examined how policies were actually made, how they traveled across levels of governance, and how they were reinterpreted by teachers and school leaders on the ground. Where neoinstitutionalism emphasized global cultural scripts, policy sociology emphasized local political struggles and the messy, contingent processes of policy enactment. The two frameworks have coexisted in productive tension: neoinstitutionalism explains why policies look similar across contexts, while policy sociology explains why they play out so differently.
The most recent major framework, cultural-political economy, emerged around 2000 as an explicit attempt to integrate insights from the critical and institutional traditions. Its proponents argued that the field had become artificially divided between economic analysis (which focused on markets, funding, and privatization) and cultural analysis (which focused on discourse, identity, and meaning). Cultural-political economy insists that economic and cultural processes are inseparable. Policies that promote school choice, for example, are simultaneously economic interventions (they create markets) and cultural interventions (they redefine education as a private good and parents as consumers). This framework draws on neo-Marxist attention to capital accumulation, poststructuralist attention to discourse, and feminist attention to the gendered effects of policy. It is the most explicitly synthetic framework in the field today, though its ambition to hold everything together also makes it demanding to operationalize in empirical research.
Education policy scholarship today is marked by theoretical pluralism. No single framework commands universal assent. The most active traditions are neoinstitutionalism, feminist policy analysis, and cultural-political economy, each with its own strengths and blind spots. Neoinstitutionalism remains the best tool for explaining global patterns in education reform—why countries on different continents adopt similar testing regimes, accountability systems, and curriculum standards. Feminist policy analysis continues to illuminate dimensions of policy that other frameworks overlook, particularly the ways gender shapes policy problems, solutions, and outcomes. Cultural-political economy offers the most comprehensive lens for analyzing complex reforms that mix economic restructuring with cultural transformation.
These frameworks agree on several points that would have seemed radical to the functionalists of the 1950s: policy is never neutral; it always reflects and reinforces power relations; and understanding policy requires attending to both material conditions and cultural meanings. But they disagree sharply on what drives policy change. Neoinstitutionalists point to global cultural norms; feminist analysts point to patriarchal structures; cultural-political economists point to the intertwined dynamics of capital accumulation and discursive struggle. Policy sociology, meanwhile, continues to offer a middle path, focusing on the contingent, context-specific processes that other frameworks sometimes gloss over. Postmodern and poststructuralist critique, while less visible as a standalone research program, has permanently shaped how the field thinks about language, categories, and the constructed nature of policy problems.
This diversity is not a sign of weakness. Education policy is too complex a phenomenon to be captured by any single lens. The frameworks that have developed over the past seventy years are not competing for a single crown; they are tools for different questions, levels of analysis, and political commitments. The field's history is the story of how researchers learned to see policy as simultaneously technical and political, global and local, material and discursive. That lesson remains the starting point for anyone who wants to understand—or change—how education policy works.