ABSTRACT

This project addresses how organizations use a push and pull process to influence the provision and use of research in education policy in the United States. The pull effects of organizations shape the prevalence and types of research available across policy issues. Organizations tasked with problem solving in education vary in their propensity to solicit research for use in the policy-making process. Organizations also exhibit push effects on the use of research evidence, taking in the supply, and pushing this into resultant regulatory policies. Together, bureaucracies and interest groups synthesize research evidence and use it to shape resulting regulatory policies. In doing so, organizations filter the research used in crafting public policies. The project will enhance the basic understanding of how groups make arguments aimed at influencing public policy, and which groups are more likely to use research to bolster their arguments. The project will provide interest group and education issue profiles for the use of research in developing regulatory proposals in education. The study will generate insights that can subsequently inform strategies used by organizations and citizens hoping to shape regulatory policy decisions in education and other issues. The project will contribute significantly to student training in the process of social research at both the graduate and undergraduate levels by developing skills in working with data, analysis, presentation, and communication of research. The project is therefore in line with larger initiatives across university campuses to engage in skills development. Finally, the project will generate insights for interest groups, policymakers, and citizens hoping to influence education policy, and general lessons for impacting regulatory reform proposals.

The project engages theoretical debates addressing how organizations channel attention to various issues, with a particular focus on how they use research evidence to channel that attention. Regulatory policy-making in education represents a flash-point for the importance of organizations, particularly given their conspicuous absence in two major strands of literature that converge in education regulations. The first is the study of the rule-making process. This literature largely focuses on the role of interest groups in shaping regulatory agendas, ignoring how bureaucracies, like USED, shape both regulatory agendas and the agendas of other actors. The second strand of literature is in education policy, where attention is disproportionately focused on legislation and educational outcomes, all but ignoring regulatory reform as a significant source of policy change. This project focuses on the institutionalized, structured, and transparent process of federal rule-making at USED. This process is unique from nearly all other modes of federal policy-making in that there is a policy proposal, followed by the opportunity for public commenting, then followed by the issuance of a revised regulatory policy. This process allows us to assess the extent to which organizations within USED shape the supply of research evidence from other actors, and in turn, examine how they incorporate research evidence into resultant regulatory policies.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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