Beating the odds : causes and conditions for policy persistence in the case of Reading Recovery

Abstract

In this project a single case, 'process tracing' methodology is used to explore an exceptional case of policy take-up, dissemination and persistence. The study focuses on the high-profile early intervention literacy programme, Reading Recovery (RR). It investigates the relationships between RR as a 'programmatic idea' and the policy context in which it was established and has persisted as programme and policy. The approach taken is historical and critical; the analysis is underpinned by a critical realist philosophy and draws on concepts and theories derived from the 'new institutionalisms' in sociology and political studies. The two 'problems' examined in this thesis are the rapid take up of RR in New Zealand during a period of tight budgetary constraints and its persistence as programme and policy through three decades of social, political and educational change. Addressing these questions has called for an analysis of two different orders of educational policy; policy making in a particular area of the primary school curriculum on the one hand, and, on the other, a wider dimension of change brought about by radical restructuring of educational administration and governance in the Iate 1980s. The Tomorrow's Schools policy (1989) dismantled the administrative and professional structures that had nurtured and promoted the intervention and, indeed, the very system in which it was designed to intervene. The new model of education administration was, in many ways, antagonistic to the continuation of a centrally funded and coordinated instructional programme and RR might well not have survived the disjuncture; but it did. In this case study the persistence of RR as a centrally funded initiative through three waves of neo-liberal reform is found to be the outcome of complex causal mechanisms including the potency of the 'programmatic idea', contextual contingencies and underlying continuities in the host system at the level of ideas, institutions, networks and allegiances.