Educational Policy Development Mechanisms Research Paper

1. Institutions As Arenas For Policy Development And Enactment

Since policy analysis emerged as a field of inquiry within educational studies more than 30 years ago, the emphasis has been on explaining why particular policies are adopted, what policy makers expect them to accomplish, and the extent to which they are implemented and actually change teaching and learning. These studies are primarily intended to improve policy by suggesting how their conclusions might inform future initiatives and strengthen the connections between policy and educational practice. Within this paradigm, institutional characteristics are assumed to be critical factors in explaining the enactment and implementation of specific policies.

The overarching conclusions from such studies are twofold: (a) political institutions define the framework in which policy making occurs and thus shape its outcomes; and (b) different institutional arrangements advantage some societal interests and policy alternatives at the expense of others (Kelman 1987). These effects occur through the structure of rules and norms that determines who may participate in the policy making process, who is granted formal authority to choose among proposals, and what procedures must be followed before those with formal authority can make a decision. In education policy, institutional arrangements are particularly critical to explaining policy outcomes, because even in the most centralized systems, political power is exercised and policy decisions are made in multiple venues or arenas. As Mazzoni (1991) notes, these arenas are never neutral in their allocation of access and power: ‘They legitimate a set of participants, establish the institutional and social context—including the governing ‘‘rules of the game’’—mediate the potency of resources and strategies, and encourage some means (and discourage other means) of reaching agreements (Mazzoni 1991, p. 116).

1.1 Interactions Among Governmental Institutions

Much policy research in education, while not always explicit about this focus, examines the interaction in arenas that share authority but operate under different rules and norms. These analyses take a number of forms, but one approach has been to use case studies that compare variation in policy outcomes across national or subnational jurisdictions, and to explain observed differences by focusing on the rules that define the respective roles of different policy-making institutions. To some extent, generalizations can be made about the relationship between the institutions that produce particular policies and the nature of those policies. For example, a common basis of comparison is the difference between policy making in parliamentary and presidential systems. Another relates to the respective domains of civil servants, judges, and elected officials. Because of their professional expertise, education bureaucrats are best equipped to deal with policies requiring high levels of technical knowledge, while judges specialize in interpreting existing law in case-by-case applications, but both groups will typically be less effective in addressing highly politicized or controversial policy issues whose resolution requires the legitimacy of the mandate held by elected politicians. Nevertheless, such generalizations have to be qualified, depending on how a country’s or a region’s historical development and political culture have shaped its political and educational systems.

A study of judicial policy development is illustrative of this interaction between history and institutional function. In their comparative analysis of education policy making by courts in Germany, the UK, Israel, and the USA, Jung and Kirp (1984) conclude that the judiciary has assumed a more central position in the USA because of constitutional provisions that make judges interpreters of the constitution and enforcers of its guarantees. In contrast, in the other three countries, the courts occupy a less central policy-making position because their role has been circumscribed constitutionally, and because of a greater emphasis on accountability through legislative representation of majoritarian interests and through professional norms guiding decision making by education bureaucrats. These historical institutional differences help to explain why policies involving questions of individual and group rights that are decided in political or administrative arenas in many countries are often transformed into judicial issues in the USA.

Institutional effects on policy outcomes can also be observed in comparing policy-making institutions within a single country. For example, in his study of the politics of school finance in the USA, Wong (1999) finds that the national government’s focus on social redistribution to address inequities based on race and social class is not reinforced by state and local allocative practices. Not only are governmental levels often operating at cross-purposes in their fiscal decisions, but the institutional rules at each level favor different constituencies and policy goals. Even in France, where education governance is highly centralized, officials recognize that there are multiple arenas in which policies can be decided, and that different arenas have different balances of power and provide incentives for different types of coalitions. Therefore, a policy outcome may depend in large measure on the arena in which the issue is decided. Across the 30 French cases that Baumgartner (1989) examined, participants ranged from small groups of experts to shared decision making by political appointees and civil servants to massive public debates and street demonstrations, with the intensity of conflict surrounding an issue a significant predictor of whether it was decided by a broad range of political participants or a narrow group of experts.

1.2 The Decentralization Debate

Probably the most common distinction among models of education policy making is the extent to which decisions governing finance, personnel, and curriculum are made centrally or by decentralized institutions such as local boards of education or even councils at individual schools. The optimal balance between centralized and decentralized decision making has been debated on both normative and empirical grounds in industrialized and developing countries alike (Lauglo 1995, Weiler 1990). Over the last 20 years of the twentieth century, there was a move toward greater decentralization of education governance. The arguments in favor of such a strategy have been economic (enhancing cost effectiveness through more efficient deployment of resources), political (ensuring wider representation of legitimate interests), and educational (customizing the learning process to local conditions). Counterarguments focus on the need for the central government to enhance equity in the face of regional resource disparities; represent the interests of the broader polity in socializing youth; and ensure some level of curricular standardization, especially where population mobility is considerable. Despite the liveliness of the debate, research has generated few firm conclusions about the relationship between the degree of decentralization in institutional arrangements governing policy decisions and educational outcomes such as student achievement (Cummings and Riddell 1994, Elmore 1993). However, it is reasonable to conclude that decentralization of some decisions will continue to have political utility as a way to diffuse conflicts over educational goals, even as central states continue to assert greater control over their educational systems (Weiler 1990).

1.3 The Role Of Nongovernmental Institutions

The design of policy-making institutions and research on those institutions have long taken into account nongovernmental entities, such as political parties and interest groups, in the formation of public policy. Both pluralist and corporatist models of decision making emphasize the role of voluntary interest groups, with the former focusing on their competition for power and influence, and the latter structuring that pluralism by allowing major interest groups to act in partnership with the state in policy formation. These two models have been particularly effective in explaining the role of large, well-established interests, such as teacher unions, in a variety of countries.

However, even in the context of corporatist states and especially in pluralist systems such as that of the USA, less formal institutions also function as key actors in the policy process. As researchers have gained a more nuanced understanding of the policy process, they have focused on the informal institutions that shape policy. The terms used to describe these informal groupings include ‘policy networks,’ ‘issue networks,’ and ‘policy communities.’ They refer to groups of actors who share an interest in a policy domain such as education, and who are linked by direct and indirect contacts with each other. Members of a policy network may come from within government (e.g., ministry officials, legislative staff) or from outside government, including interest group representatives, academics, and analysts in universities and policy research institutes, as well as journalists. A pivotal player in an issue network and in explaining the emergence of particular problems and proposals on the policy agenda is the ‘policy entrepreneur’— someone either inside or outside government who is willing to invest their time, energy, and reputation promoting a particular policy concept in the hope of a future return (Kingdon 1995).

The actions of policy networks and policy entrepreneurs are particularly significant in explaining ‘policy borrowing,’ or the diffusion of innovations from one jurisdiction to another and across national borders— for example, the move to decentralize education governance and give parents greater choice in their children’s schooling. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, the volume and rate of policy diffusion within education significantly increased through a variety of mechanisms, including international organizations such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), associations of elected officials, international networks of politicians sharing similar political ideologies, and policy research institutes or ‘think tanks’ with national and international audiences. Most research on this phenomenon has been based on comparative case studies, although attempts have been made to calculate diffusion rates and identify major explanatory variables through quantitative analyses (for examples of each type of study, see Mintrom and Vergari 1998, Halpin and Troyna 1995). Although much remains to be learned in this area, research has found that policy makers are likely to ‘borrow’ policy innovations from other jurisdictions based on both the reliability and trustworthiness of the innovators, and the degree of similarity between the ideology and characteristics of the innovators’s education system and those of the ‘borrowers.’

2. The Sources Of Policy

The focus on informal mechanisms acknowledges that policy development does not begin with the enactment process, but also includes the more diffuse agenda setting process during which adverse educational conditions are identified as policy problems; new or preexisting proposals are framed as solutions to those problems; and political officials are convinced (often by policy entrepreneurs) that they have sufficient incentive to act on the issue (Kingdon 1995). During agenda setting and enactment, participants in the policy-making process shape the content of a policy by defining its objectives and selecting the instruments or strategies used to achieve those objectives. The goals and strategies chosen depend to a large extent on how a policy problem is defined, with the entire process of problem definition and policy choice dependent on the competing motivations of participants.

2.1 Interests And Ideas As Policy Sources

Understanding the motivations of those who advance and enact policy proposals can shed additional light on the process by which policy is developed, the sources that give policies their substantive content, and, more generally, on the dynamics of the larger political system. However, over the last two decades of the twentieth century, the nature of those motivations has been the subject of a major normative and empirical debate within economics, political science, and policy analysis.

On the one side is the rational choice model, borrowed from microeconomics. It assumes that political actors know what their self-interest is, and pursue it in the political arena through bargaining with other actors who are also pursuing their self-interest and whose support is needed to build a coalition representing enough votes to enact a given policy. In this model, policy is the result of a series of negotiations or exchanges among self-interested parties.

On the other side are those who argue that accounts of policy making based solely on self-interest are incomplete, and that other goals or motivations are needed to explain policy sources and outcomes. This category of motivations is typically referred to as ‘ideas,’ and includes both the notion of a public interest that transcends self-interest and, in the case of education, theories about how children ought to be educated and who ought to be responsible for that education. Those who see ideas as a source of policy typically view policy making as more than just the result of whatever bargains can be struck. Rather, it is also characterized by deliberation among participants whose preferences are not fixed. During the deliberative process, participants consider various policy options on their merits. As a result, participants come to understand better their own interests and those of others, and policy decisions are more than just the result of ‘splitting the difference’ among competing interests (for a discussion of these two models applied to education policy, see the chapters in McDonnell et al. 2000).

Much of the debate over the validity of interests versus ideas in explaining policy outcomes has been waged deductively and on normative grounds, rather than on the basis of empirical research. However, over the past decade, researchers have realized that neither model provides a full explanation. Much of public policy is motivated by self-or group interest, whether it be politicians’ desire to be reelected or interest groups’s efforts to enhance their members’s material advantages. Nevertheless, as Kingdon (1993) argues, self-interest provides an incomplete explanation for policy outcomes. Not only are ideas necessary to persuade others to accept even the most self-interested policy options, but comprehensive and far-reaching policies are more likely than narrow, specialized ones to be motivated by ideology and by concepts that transcend self-interest (Kelman 1987). In fact, ideas and interests are so intertwined that it is often difficult to measure their independent effects (Kingdon 1993). One can acknowledge, for example, that teacher unions seek to improve their members’s salaries and working conditions, but also that they represent professional values that may lead them to espouse policy options that may benefit the educational enterprise generally, but not necessarily the self-interest of all their members (e.g., consider peer evaluations leading to the dismissal of unqualified teachers).

2.2 Policy Instruments

Whether goals, such as access to advanced courses or higher student achievement, are the result of self-interest or ideas, the policies that embody them must also incorporate strategies for translating those goals into actions that lead to changes in school and classroom practices. To make systematic comparisons across individual policies and to understand how policy design influences implementation and ultimate effects, analysts have focused on the concept of policy instruments or tools. These are generic mechanisms that translate substantive policy goals into the actions needed to effect change, and they can be thought of as the basic building blocks of any policy. Although researchers differ in how they conceptualize categories of policy instruments, and in the total number of distinct instruments they identify, they agree that different types of instrument embody different assumptions about how a policy problem is defined, the causal process through which government action can change the behavior of policy targets, and what the expected effects of that action will be (McDonnell and Elmore 1987).

Two classes of policy instruments are included in all categorizations and are used frequently in education policy: mandates impose rules on targets and are intended to produce compliance (e.g., school-leaving policies, nondiscrimination requirements), and inducements provide money and other tangible payoffs on the condition that targets perform specified actions (e.g., grant-in-aid programs). However, a variety of other instruments are used in education policy, including: capacity-building strategies to promote longer-term investments in enhancing human capital; hortatory policies that motivate action by providing information or appealing to policy targets’s values (e.g., published reports on school quality); and system changing instruments that transfer authority from one institutional sector to another (e.g., privatization schemes).

3. Future Research

Despite a growing recognition that much can be learned from examining policy mechanisms comparatively, such research is still limited. However, the current worldwide emphasis on implementing policies aimed at comprehensive school reform has given a new impetus to comparative education policy research (Fowler 1995). The most productive direction for that research is likely to be studies based on models that conceptualize policy making as the interplay of interests and ideas, constrained by the institutional rules and norms of the different arenas that share authority over education.

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