TY  - JOUR
AB  - By excavating submerged dynamics underlying literacy accountability policy, this historical case study conceptualizes its institutional logic and political drivers. Bridging and extending theorization in American political development and racial political behavior, I contribute an original developmental model of democratic and respectable family rights policy regimes to address when, how, and why a “crisis” can shape dominant meanings and understandings of racial equality. I use a process tracing method to collect and analyze 2,256 archival documents from 1968 to 1990, capturing change from partial federal support of culturally responsive literacy to singular promotion of White Mainstream English and heteronormative, middle-class family values. My analysis demonstrates how accountability entrepreneurs constructed and legitimized a literacy crisis via two, often linked, framing and networking mechanisms: (1) deviance knots, in-text associations between movements for Black interclass, intergenerational solidarity and threats to traditional family norms posed by gender, sexually, or economically marginalized classes; (2) deputy webs, appeals to White women and Black men as parental or paternal figures to support facially race-neutral policy carrying respectability norms. I show how these drivers of a racial double standard of family empowerment led to coalitional realignment, systematic exclusion of Black and Brown women, and narrowed ideas of equality and family. I discuss how this model deepens explanations of accountability and offers tools toward conceptualizing and evaluating democratic conditions of academic learning and family engagement.
AU  - Stein, Andrew
PY  - 2026
ST  - Towards a Developmental Model of Democratic Family Rights Policy Regimes: Tracing Federal Literacy Policy, 1968-1990
TI  - Towards a Developmental Model of Democratic Family Rights Policy Regimes: Tracing Federal Literacy Policy, 1968-1990
UR  - http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1448
ER  -