Do policy actors benefit from research on themselves?

Abstract

Perceptions of State Political Culture by State Education Policy Elites and Building a Taxonomy of State Education Policies describe research designed to develop methods of classifying states based on their approach to policy making. A classification of states based on policy makers' perceptions of the state's political culture, and a taxonomy of state education policies should be helpful to people who want to analyze the educational policies of the states and who need some tools and concepts to help them organize the states into groups. For those of us who are in the states trying to help establish workable policies, however, such systems are of marginal use. We need information about other states and about systems for organizing the states into groups so that we can identify those which are most similar and dissimilar to ours in educational policy making styles and current approaches to issues. The concepts of political culture and state policy mechanisms do not meet these needs. For example, I could use a conceptual framework that will help me respond when somebody quotes to me a law from Texas and wants to know if it would work in Arizona. I need a way to determine how Texas differs from Arizona with respect to the issues raised by the proposed law. I might need to know, for example, whether Texas tends to support the concept of control as much as Arizona does, and to what extent Texas laws and regulations typically allow local determination in the specific policy areas of concern. The concepts of political culture and state policy mechanisms are just too general to be of assistance in situa-