Recognizing the Political in Implementation Research

The widely publicized opposition to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is in marked contrast to its relatively uncontroversial development and adoption—a contrast that points to the importance of understanding how the politics of enactment differs from the politics of implementation. In this article, we draw on the research literatures on enactment, implementation, and policy feedback to outline the reasons that the politics of policy implementation may look quite different from the politics of enactment, and we argue that education researchers need to pay as much attention to the political sustainability of reforms as to their implementation into school-level practice. This essay is an exercise in retrieval and construction, looking back to early implementation studies that featured political factors as key components of their analytical frameworks but also building on the insights from newer research that uses policy feedback as its theoretical lens. In arguing why the analysis of a policy’s political sustainability should be more systematically integrated into implementation research, we draw illustrative examples from the CCSS.