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Focusing on Massachusetts' innovative special education reform law, Chapter 766, "Reforming Special Education" traces the complex processes through which an ostensibly universalistic and equitable policy can produce a biased distribution of public benefits favoring affluent clients."Reforming Special Education" examines three Massachusetts school systems and seven schools within those systems to determine whether laws formulated to alter practices in educating children who are deaf, blind, retarded, and physically handicapped actually result in fair and uniform treatment of children with special needs, or whether they just create more work for school personnel.The book discusses individual and community wealth as factors in the allocation of funds. Despite Massachusetts' "equalizing formula," it points out that rich districts often fare better than poor ones because they have the resources and sophistication necessary to challenge funding decisions. The book also reveals that bureaucrats who are charged with carrying out the changes are victimized by new laws which, for lack of resources, they cannot hope to put into effect. Because the street-level bureaucrats, front-line personnel, develop informal means of coping with these problems and with their jobs, they distort the policy they are charged with implementing and become policy makers in their own right.Weatherley concludes that policy initiatives must take into account potential effects on the daily work routines of those charged with implementing them. These findings have dramatic implications for all human service bureaucracies where front-line staff interact with the public--hospitals, police departments, public welfare and employment offices, mental health centers and lower courts. Students of public policy, educators, social workers, or anyone involved in public service employment will find this a scholarly, yet highly readable account of the organizational constraints to bureaucratic reform.
Fifteen papers commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education's School Finance Project are contained in this volume. The papers examine the changing dimensions of the federal-state partnership in education. The volume is organized into four sections. The first section is devoted to state educational policy concerns, including various state approaches to improving educational quality, school finance reform, and the states' relationship to special needs students. In the second section, the focus is on lessons states can learn from federal education programs, including material on federal strategies used prior to 1981 to deliver services to target groups such as the disadvantaged or handicapped, federal strategies for educational improvement, and what past experience with different types of federal programs can teach about intervention effectiveness. Consolidated and block grants as an alternative framework for federal-state programs and the probable responses of state education agencies to such programs are the subjects of the third section. The final section offers recommendations for restructuring the federal-state partnership in education, including the suggestion that the federal government adopt differential treatment for states that are merely adapting federal programs and states that are not complying. The suggestion is made that one form of differentiating (waivers) would be expensive and cumbersome. Other recommendations concern school-based strategies for school improvement and federal and state policies that reward improvement of learning. (JM)
This book examines how public policy influences institutional performance. Public institutions of higher learning are called upon by state governments to provide educational access and opportunity for students. Paradoxically, the education policies enacted by state legislatures are often complex and costly to implement, which can detract from that mission. The authors evaluate the higher education systems of five states to explain how these policies are developed and how they affect the performance of individual institutions. They identify the rules that are central to the coherence and performance of higher education systems that administrators apply to meet organizational goals within the constraints of changing, sometimes conflicting federal and state policies.
Intended for policymakers, the report examines the federal government's efforts to influence state and local governments on matters of education. Two agencies within the Department of Education are spotlighted: the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Office of Special Education (OSE). Parallel case studies of OCR and OSE were conducted via more than 150 interviews which sought to identify informal strategies used to influence state and local actions. Interviewees included federal officials from both Washington and regional offices; interest group representatives; members of state and local educational agencies; and complainants, parents, and beneficiary group representatives. Following a discussion of the two offices' operating styles and assumptions, a typology of influence methods available to OCR and OSE is postulated. Two major influence strategies (enforcement and promotion) are identified, and the effects of each on decision making administrative processes, and general policies at the state and local level are considered. A final section presents a framework depicting factors to be considered by the federal government in decisions regarding change for local and state government activities. The importance of matching federal goals with local conditions and of using hybrid strategies is emphasized. (CL)
"The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state, and local--at which these functions would best be handled.
Manna explores the dynamics of forty years of education policymaking to answer a puzzling question: if state and local governments are the primary caretakers of elementary and secondary education, how have federal policymakers so greatly expanded their involvement in the country's schools since 1965? From Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the carefully worded funding bill, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to George W. Bush's imposing but underfunded "No Child Left Behind" initiative, Washington's influence over America's schools has increased signficantly. At the same time, the states have developed more comprehensive, and often innovative education policies. A wide array of educational issues has appeared on the political agenda both nationally and at the state level. Manna argues that this is no accident: that national and state leaders have borrowed strength from each other-- strength in terms of both politically viable arguments and of such governmental capacity to act as financing, the existence of regulatory agencies, and professional capability--to develop and enact educational reforms. He shows how our nation's education agenda has taken shape through the interaction of policy entrepreneurs at national and state levels in our federal system of government. Based on Manna's analyses of public laws, presidential speeches, congressional testimony, public opinion, political advertising, and personal interviews, this book draws on concepts of federalism and agenda-setting to offer an original view of the growing federal role in education policy.