Michael A. Gottfried and Gilberto Q. Conchas, eds., When School Policies Backfire: How Well‐Intentioned Measures Can Harm Our Most Vulnerable Students (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016). 222 pp. $33.00 (paper), ISBN: 9781612509075

• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Author: James V. Shuls
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12961
• Date: 01 July 2018

650 Public Administration Review • July | Augu st 20 18

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 4, pp. 650–651. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12961.

James V. Shuls is assistant professor

and the graduate program director of

educational leadership and policy studies

at the University of Missouri – St. Louis.

His research focuses on a broad range

of education policy issues, with special

emphasis on teacher labor markets, school

finance, and school choice issues. He

holds a PhD in education policy from the

University of Arkansas.

E-mail: shulsj@umsl.edu

In the introduction to When School Policies

Backfire: How Well-Intentioned Measures Can Harm

Our Most Vulnerable Students, editors Michael

A. Gottfried and Gilberto Q. Conchas and two

co-authors offer a clear articulation of the need for

this book. Scholars regularly devote pages, articles,

and columns to policies that work. Yet often policies

that are designed to improve the lot of disadvantaged

students end up doing more harm than good. These

policies backfire. Rarely do scholars, practitioners, or

policy makers take the time to evaluate and analyze

why this is so. This failure to understand our policy

follies leaves us open to repeating our own mistakes. It

is only in understanding what went wrong, Gottfried

and Conchas suggest, that we can learn from our

mistakes and improve in the future. As such, the

editors assembled a stellar team of scholars to discuss a

host of educational policies and how they fell far short

of achieving their goal.

Clearly, studying policy backfire is a useful pursuit.

To do so, we must first understand what it means for

a policy to backfire. To this end, the editors carefully

define what they mean by the term. They note that

backfire is not synonymous with failure, not even

“phenomenal failure” (3). Rather, backfire is “when

a polity or intervention has the exact opposite effect

of what it was intended to do.” This definition is

instructive. A backfire is not simply a program having

a null effect or costing too much money—it is when

the policy was intended to improve an outcome

but instead has a deleterious effect on the outcome.

They provide the D.A.R.E program as an example.

The program, designed to help reduce drug use, by

many accounts inadvertently increased drug use. It

backfired. It had the exact opposite effect that it was

supposed to have.

The first chapter of the book helps the reader to

better understand the concept of backfire. The

chapter’s author, Shaun M. Dougherty, explains how

a middle school literacy program ended up leaving

black students worse off at the end of the program.

He noted, “the reading intervention program that

set out to improve performance had the reverse

effect—negatively impacting the performance of

some students—and created a gap between Black

and White eligible students where previously there

was not one” (37). Undoubtedly, the program

backfired. The usefulness of this chapter; however, is

not simply in noting that the policy backfired, but

in identifying how it backfired. The district used an

“objective criterion” for selection into the program

without considering how that measure, test scores,

might have heterogeneous impacts on students from

different schools or races. Readers of the chapter can

learn lessons from this analysis and walk away with a

better understanding of what it means for a policy to

backfire. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the

rest of the book.

In the end, the definition of backfire offered by the

editors is problematic for the editors themselves.

They sought to offer clarity, so that readers might

better understand policy backfire. Throughout the

book, however, the chapter authors do not follow

this definition. Often, they discuss policy failures and

label them backfires. As Gottfried and Conchas clearly

stated in the beginning of the book, however, failing

is not synonymous with backfire. To backfire, a policy

has to have the opposite effect of what it intended.

Given this definition, the editors’ attempt to clarify

the term backfire in the reader’s mind has completely

backfired. Rather than offer a clear and consistent use

of the term throughout the book, the various authors

offer a mishmash of definitions that leave the average

reader confused about what it actually means for a

policy to backfire.

The wheels begin to fall off in the second chapter.

Here Andrew McEachin and Allison Atteberry discuss

how school accountability policies backfire, only they

do not—at least, not according to the definition in the

introduction to the book. McEachin and Atteberry

note the purpose of school accountability policies is to

“raise the performance of underperforming schools.”

Reviewed by: James V. Shuls

University of Missouri

Michael A. Gottfried and Gilberto Q. Conchas, eds., When School

Policies Backfire: How Well-Intentioned Measures Can Harm Our

Most Vulnerable Students (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press,

2016). 222 pp. $33.00 (paper), ISBN: 9781612509075

Book Reviews

Galia Cohen, Editor