Politics and Policy Knowledge in Federal Education

Policy knowledge derived from data, information, and evidence is a powerful tool for contributing to policy discussions and debates, and for understanding and improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of government action. For decades, politicians, advocates, reformers, and researchers have simultaneously espoused this value, while also paradoxically lamenting the lack of impact of policy knowledge on decision making, and the failure of related reforms. This text explores this paradox, identifying the reliance on a proverb of using policy knowledge to supplant politics as a primary culprit for these perceived failures. The evidence in this book suggests that any consideration of the role of policy knowledge in decision making must be considered alongside, rather than in place of, considerations of the ideologies, interests, and institutional factors that shape political decisions. This contextually rich approach offers practical insights to understand the role of policy knowledge, and to better leverage it to support good governance decisions.

Provides a contextually rich framework for assessing government decision making that includes political factors of ideology, interests, and institutions as well as technical inputs from data, information, and evidence Offers practical insights both for decision makers and for producers of policy knowledge to understand whether, how, and why data, information, and evidence can influence and improve decision making Develops a comprehensive typology of data, information, and evidence that offers predictive and explanatory power for understanding key factors related to the purpose, design, and ultimate use of policy knowledge Introduces hypotheses related to, and finds support for, associations between program characteristics and the relative dominance of political or technical factors in decision-making. Provides a comprehensive 50-year examination of decision making related to major federal education policies from their creation in 1965

Autorentext

Steven Putansu is a Senior Design Methodologist at the US Government Accountability Office, Professorial Lecturer at American University, USA, and recipient of a 2017 Arthur S. Flemming Award for Federal Management and Leadership.

Inhalt

1. Policy Knowledge, Politics, and a Proverb of Decisions Making.- 2. No Panacea - The Purposes, Uses, and Limitations of Policy Knowledge.- 3. Challenging the Proverb: A Balanced Model for Governance Decisions.- 4. The Performance Movement and other Evidence-Based Reforms.- 5. The Roots of Modern Federal Education Policy.- 6. Improving Access to Higher Education.- Education for the Disadvantaged.- 8. Contending with the Evidence-Based Proverb.- 9. Moving Beyond the Evidence-Based Proverb.