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Policy Models and Equal Educational Opportunity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Joseph Stewart Jr.
Joseph Stewart Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Dallas
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Extract

If anyone doubts that policy analysis is like a hot dog—its contents are both variable and suspect— Sabatier's essay in this issue should remove those doubts. His outlines of the open systems/funnel of causality, rational actors within institutions, policy streams, and advocacy coalitions approaches make pellucid that adherents to any one of these perspectives will examine different variables in searching for truth, beauty, or at least explanation in public policy-making. A full illustration of how each of these lens, when focused on the same policy area, would yield a somewhat different image would require a volume of significant length. While the profession waits for Sabatier to produce such a volume, perhaps we can be satisfied with a brief discussion of how the pursuit of equal educational opportunity would be viewed through a pair of these lenses. The rational actors within institutions and advocacy coalition lenses are used to examine this important policy area.

When the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the “separate but equal” interpretation of the constitution (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) and followed that quickly with a decision ignoring the “but equal” part of the phrase in public education (Cumming v. County Board of Education, 1899), racially segregated schools were legitimized. What followed was a long war, waged most obviously by the legal arm of the NAACP (Tushnet, 1987), which led to the Supreme Court's reversal of the Plessy decision (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, 1955). At that point policy-making in the area of equal educational opportunity shifted from a focus on overturning a loathsome judicial precedent to implementing a favorable one. Initial euphoria led to overly optimistic predictions about the speed with which segregated school systems could be dismantled.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 167 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1991

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