Policy Intermediaries Research Articles

How Can Research-Practice Partnerships Advance Multilingual Learner Equity? A Case Study of Partnership with State-Education-Agency Leaders

ABSTRACT Although multilingual learner (ML) students are present in nearly all K-12 settings, they tend to be served by schools and educators who are inadequately prepared to support them. While state education agency leaders may be well-positioned to address inequities in ML education, given their roles as policy intermediaries, their work is politically complex. Further, professional development support for state-level leaders has historically been limited. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) represent a promising avenue for addressing this absence in state leadership support, as RPPs aim to promote educational transformation through collaboration between researchers and practitioners. In our case, we posit that state-education-agency leaders’ engagement in a cross-state RPP has the potential to support enactment of transformative-leadership practices, specifically through opportunities to think and work with role-alike colleagues and external researchers. Drawing on qualitative case study methods, our findings reveal how ongoing RPP collaboration in small groups supported state leaders’ enactment of transformative approaches, such as developing a statewide framework for ML education and supporting district leaders with using ML-specific funds in equity- and evidence-based ways. Findings shed light on specific RPP activities that supported leaders’ collaboration, which may inform how future partnerships are facilitated to advance equity-focused change efforts.

Family dynamics towards heritage language maintenance

This article investigates Family Language Policy and grassroots-level practices of the heritage language speakers who are first-generation migrants of Indian background in Northern Ireland. Having been settled since the 1920s, Indians are one of the longest-established ethnic minorities in the region, representing around 0.5% of the total non-white residents. Whilst languages of migrant communities brought further complexity to the existing linguistic diversity of Northern Ireland, discussions around language policy in this geopolitical domain focus primarily on its two indigenous languages: Irish and Ulster-Scots. There is no particular policy to promote the languages of migrant communities. Drawing on ethnographic observations and two focus groups, the article analyses the language dynamics of eight Belfast-based families. It further demonstrates how these parents become policy intermediaries by monitoring their children’s heritage language learning through explicit teaching, creating a favourable literacy atmosphere at home, ensuring its use in the family through continuous policing and developing identity through constant dialogue with children about Indian culture. Although the under-the-radar participation of these parents may appear intermittently in the policy discourse, their actions can be interpreted as bottom-up language planning to contest the monopoly of the dominant language and culture in the broader community.

Developing a Research–Practice Partnership With Policy Intermediaries: An Examination of Collaboration With State Education Agency Leaders

A growing body of scholarship foregrounds research–practice partnerships (RPPs) as venues for advancing equity in education. However, few studies focus on partnerships with state education agency leaders, despite their influential roles connecting policy and practice. This article explores state leaders’ experiences collaborating in an early-phase, national RPP focused on advancing multilingual learner equity. Findings shed light on how joint work was facilitated through the development of evidence-based resources addressing current problems of practice. Findings also demonstrate the importance of attending to leaders’ dual responsibilities across state and local levels, informing future efforts to foster partnerships with state leaders. Future research is needed to examine the sustainability of state-level RPPs, as well as the experiences of researchers engaging in such partnerships.

When policy intermediaries produce knowledge: A Bourdieusian analysis of the Education Endowment Foundation’s influence in a multi-academy trust

ABSTRACT This article reports on data and analysis from a case study investigating policy enactments in a multi-academy trust (MAT) in England. The focus is the influence of a policy intermediary organisation (PIO), The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), on policy making by school leaders. The case is located in the literacy policy of a MAT of 15 schools. Data gathering consisted of semi-structured interviews and observations of meetings as a new literacy policy was developed. I argue using Bourdieu’s thinking tools that the EEF functions as a policy entrepreneur actively engaged in policy making in the MAT. Data evidence that the EEF influences the field agents of the MAT to underpin local policy with functionalist, standardized solutions to literacy problems. The EEF offers one example of how PIOs can be used to steer enactments to fit with government agenda, by triggering a misrecognition, which limits the capacity of education professionals to consider alternatives.

Advancing “Intersectional Servingness” in Research, Practice, and Policy With Hispanic-Serving Institutions

There has been a surge in the number of Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), which are degree-granting, nonprofit, postsecondary institutions that enroll at least 25% Hispanic/Latinx/e undergraduate students. Although HSI scholarship has increased dramatically since around 2010, there is still a gap in knowledge about individuals who fall within the “H” and the diversity among HSIs themselves. Using critical theory and critical methods, the articles in this special topic collection explore the complexities of the Hispanic/Latinx/e identity and the various ways that HSIs fall short of and meet the challenges of serving students at the intersections of identity. This introduction provides a brief overview of the eight articles in this collection and explains the need for this critical approach to HSI scholarship, which we call “intersectional servingness.” We outline the contributions of these eight articles and call on practitioners, scholars, policy intermediaries, funders, and federal agencies to consider the complexities of the “H” while making decisions, advancing research, implementing policies, and creating funding streams that will enhance intersectional servingness.

‘We have to be really careful’: policy intermediaries preventing violent extremism in an era of risk

ABSTRACT In the field of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) schools have an important role to play, but precisely how policy actors and educators should best respond to extremism within their schools remains uncertain. Reporting on data from a broader study, this article draws on semi-structured interviews with three participants. The participants were working as policy intermediaries responsible for implementing a federally funded, small-scale grant to develop a program in four Australian schools intended to guard against student behaviours deemed ‘at risk’ of leading to violent extremism. Investigating the strategies and negotiations of these policy intermediaries, we demonstrate the politicization of policy enactment in the field of P/CVE. We draw on Beck’s work to understand the discourses of risk that underpin the P/CVE space and to focus on the strategic negotiations of these policy intermediaries as responses to various forms of risk. The findings contribute to understandings of ‘risk management’ in a neoliberal state particularly in the development and enactment of policy in education, through a focus on how policy intermediaries operate in an ‘in-between’ space between federal prerogatives and local constraints.

From Protests to Policies: Actors, Spaces and Processes

This paper addresses a rather understudied aspect of the ways through which protests get translated into policies by focussing on the actors, spaces and processes. It further identifies key actors in the policy making formulation process, which we call ‘policy intermediaries’. It discusses the emergence of ‘policy intermediaries’ in relation to the history of social movements in post-colonial India. It situates the policy making processes in the country and the role of ‘policy intermediaries’ therein, in the overall context of changing configurations of relationships amongst the state, non-governmental organisations, think tanks and the emergent transnational networks and discourses. By implication, it maps out some of the attributes of middle class activism with illustrations from select social movements in India. The paper explores the multiple spaces in which ‘policy intermediaries’ function, the diverse roles they play and the networks in which they are wilfully or otherwise enmeshed.

Lobbying the Client: The role of policy intermediaries in corporate political activity

Traditionally, CPA scholarship has either assumed away policy intermediaries completely, or depicted them as corporate mouthpieces. Meanwhile, research on policy intermediaries has portrayed actors such as think tanks, PR firms and lobbying firms as far more active and self-interested. Our study investigates this puzzle by attending to the question: ‘Whose political agenda is expressed by intermediaries during their lobbying on behalf of corporate clients?’ By importing insights from studies of policy intermediaries, and approaching the world of lobbying qualitatively – delving deep into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of corporate lobbying using ethnographic field data and interviews with corporate lobbyists – we provide a different, more fine-grained picture of the lobbyist–client relationship, in which policy intermediaries shape, adapt and even invent their clients’ agendas. Our study contributes CPA scholarship by (1) providing an analytical distinction between the political agendas of corporate clients and those of their lobbyists, (2) bringing further detail and modification to Barley’s theory of an institutional field of political influence and (3) identifying agency problems between client and lobbyist as a novel explanation for why the financial profitability of CPA investment has been difficult to verify. Moreover, the study brings further sophistication to a burgeoning literature on policy intermediaries by suggesting that lobbyists’ own professional characteristics – such as length of political experience and strength of political convictions – influence how independently of their clients they dare to act.

The urbanization policy of Turkey: an uneasy symbiosis of unimplemented policy with centralized pragmatic interventions

ABSTRACTRegarding urbanization policy in Turkey, one can observe how policy-making efforts continuously have moved away from transnational influences and reverted to more pragmatic, national-oriented practices in the last three decades. The results of different attempts to make sustainable urbanization policy for Turkey are vivid examples of how aspirations to reframe national urban development pattern through policy transfer failed and a nationalistic, pragmatic and authoritarian intervention, each time more hard-hitting than before, emerged with dire consequences. Occasionally, distinctive characteristics of the Turkish experience manifested itself in the uneasy symbiosis of policy-making with neo-liberal practices in cities. Using qualitative methodology, this study provides an account of Turkey’s urbanization policy-making episodes in the last decade to show how consecutive attempts to use policy learning and participation as leverage gradually alienated policy intermediaries and allowed strengthening of neo-liberal interventions in urban sphere.

International advocacy for contract-based public private partnerships through case studies: a re-interpretation of Southern Cross Station, Melbourne

ABSTRACTIn response to urban infrastructure deficits, international organisations, such as the United Nations, encourage governments to harness private finance. Contract-based Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) represent one policy option enabling infrastructure to be privately financed and constructed, and for service provision to occur. With PPPs also a contested policy option, private sector policy intermediaries advocate for their adoption, including through the selective promotion of case studies. In recognition that favourable case study narratives may leach out local context, a multi-dimensional analytical framework is introduced distinguishing between de-institutionalised, aspatial, non-historical, uncritical and non-futuristic perspectives. Recently the private sector-led World Economic Forum published ‘Harnessing Public-Private Cooperation to Deliver the New Urban Agenda’, which reported upon the PPP-led development of Spencer Street (or Southern Cross) Station in Melbourne, Australia. In deploying the framework, this paper concludes that case study narratives can be reductionist and locally detached in various ways. The role of policy intermediaries in the transfer of policy information therefore requires carefully interpretation, not least because of the malleable use of case studies to reveal desired conclusions.

"It's Not a Gotcha": Interpreting Teacher Evaluation Policy in Rural School District

This multi-case study explored how local policy actors in rural school districts interpreted new teacher evaluation policies and how state-level policy actors influenced local policy responses. In the first phase of the study, teachers and administrators in four rural school districts in two U.S. states were interviewed about new state teacher evaluation policies and their own local efforts to meet policy demands, while the study’s second phase investigated the work of state-level policy actors. Shedding light on the realities of tackling reform mandates in rural schools, the study finds that teacher evaluation policy efforts are challenged by the tension between the formative and summative purposes of teacher evaluation, that teacher evaluation policies allowing local control in system design require a significant commitment at the local level, that local actors rely on and value the work of policy intermediaries, and that interpreting teacher evaluation policy and planning for implementation can be particularly challenging in small rural school districts.

Central District Office Leadership for Diversity and Equity: Constraints and Opportunities for Policy Intermediaries

This article reports the findings of a multiyear investigation of school district central office directors of diversity and equity in Minnesota, who play an important role in school desegregation/integration policy implementation. Ethnographic and survey data were collected to examine a range of leadership activities and perspectives in communities across the state that received state funding for integration programming. In this article, I present findings that illustrate the role of integration leaders as boundary-spanning policy intermediaries who navigate competing frames of meaning about the purpose and value of diversity in learning environments. Learning from these school district leaders’ focus on educational equity in the context of changing demographics offers opportunities to address local community needs more directly.

Framing policy designs through contradictory emotions: The case of Czech single mothers

In public policy scholarship on policy design, emotions are still treated as opposed to goals, and their presence is assumed to signal that things have gone wrong. We argue, however, that understanding how and for whom emotions matter is vital to the dynamics of policy designs because emotions are central to the capacity building of policy intermediaries and, with that, to the success of public policies. We examine the case of Czech single mothers in their role as intermediaries in ‘alimony policy’. Our interpretive survey provided single mothers an opportunity to express the way they experience the policy emotionally. The analysis reveals that the policy goal of the child’s well-being is produced at the cost of the mother’s emotional tensions and that policy designs defuse these emotional tensions, implicitly. These contradictory emotions expressed by mothers show us a gateway to problematising policy designs in a novel way, which reconsiders construing policy design as a technical, solution-oriented enterprise to one in which emotional tensions intervene in policy design and are essential for succeeding.

Challenges to generating evidence-informed policy and the role of systematic reviews and (perceived) conflicts of interest

Background: Multiple efforts to generate evidence-informed policy have attempted to teach policymakers how to understand and apply scientific research findings in their decision-making. These efforts have had limited success, because policymakers generally do not understand scientific methods.Objective: We piloted efforts to teach policy intermediaries – specifically consumer advocacy groups – how to understand and apply health research, anticipating that they might offer such evidence to policymakers in more accessible forms.Design: Four workshops focusing on research design and methods were conducted with consumer advocacy groups in 2010. We coded and analyzed participant responses regarding their confidence in interpreting research findings and assessments of research credibility, and the extent to which their knowledge about research findings changed after completing the workshops.Results: Our findings suggest that although participants expressed strong interest in understanding scientific research, their ability to develop confidence about scientific research methods was limited. However, like policymakers, consumer advocacy group members intuited that financial conflicts of interest could compromise scientific findings, although they initially underestimated their effects on research results. After training, consumer advocates also saw the value of using systematic reviews rather than individual studies.Discussion and Conclusions: Our findings suggest that although advocates may not feel confident in their understanding of scientific research, they found it easier to understand the value of systematic reviews and the risks of conflicts of interest than other statistical concepts and terminology. Focusing on making these types of information available may offer a useful way for policymakers and consumer advocates to interpret the validity of policy-relevant scientific research.

Language Policy and Planning in Language Education: Legacies, Consequences, and Possibilities

This article considers the relevance of language policy and planning (LPP) for language education in the United States in relation to the country's longstanding and continuing multilingualism. In reflecting on the U.S. context, one striking feature is the absence of a guiding overarching explicit national educational language policy. Language policies and practices may either promote or restrict the teaching of languages. Thus, whether having such a policy would be desirable for promoting the learning of languages depends on a number of factors such as the features of the policy and the extent to which it was adequately resourced, understood, valued, and implemented effectively, just to mention a few. Explicit language planning and policy making in the United States−when it does occur−tends to be done at the state, local, or institutional levels, or within rather limited domains of federal priorities, such as those related to defense or national security. Beyond formal policies, implicit language practices sometimes have more influence on language behavior. Even when policies are intended to promote languages, they may not always be well conceived, received, resourced, or implemented.Given some of these issues, it is useful to consider the role of agency in language planning and policy (LPP). Even when guided by national or state top‐down policy agendas, policies can be interpreted and reinterpreted, by policy intermediaries, agents, administrators, or arbiters (Johnson, ). Moreover, within the context of school language policies, at the level of implementation, teachers, parents, and the students themselves help to determine the effectiveness of policies in practice (Menken & García, ). Beyond the schools, parents and stakeholders in the community can play significant roles in creating practices that have the force of policy from the bottom up. Given these considerations, this article weighs the role of policy and the legacy of past policies and their consequences; assesses some of the strengths and weaknesses of current policies and practices, both in schools and families and communities; and considers prospects for a more promising future that involves embracing the fundamental multilingualism of U.S. society, communities, and families. In so doing, the article reflects on alternatives to U.S. language education policy that would transcend national conceptions of languages so as to leverage speakers’ actual linguistic competence.

Policy intermediaries and the reform of e‐Education inSouthAfrica

AbstractUtilising a case study approach and backward mapping principles to policy implementation, this study set out to explore how well district and province's e‐learning officials are equipped for the task of implementing the national e‐Education policy. Qualitative methods were employed to capture data through interviews and document analysis. Data were analysed using grounded theory methods. Analyses of e‐learning official's constructions about information and communication technology implementation in schools yielded patterns in their understandings of policy implementation. Findings were fourfold. First, district and provincial e‐learning leaders superficially understood the e‐Education policy, missing policy intent of their role as policy intermediaries. Second, they perceived their role mainly as policy conduits focusing on the dissemination of the policy to schools. Third, the compartmentalisation of directorates performing the same function lacked communication, interaction and coherence. Fourth, district's capacity and lack of competence impacted negatively on their ability to implement policy and support schools. This study suggests that for intermediaries to be effective implementers of policy, they need to become teachers of policy. In order to achieve this, it becomes necessary and crucial for them to participate in the process of policy formulation, appropriation, interpretation and the learning of policy.However much policy makers may have wished the districts to be able to perform what official policy aspired to, the reality is otherwise.

Recombinant workfare, across the Americas: Transnationalizing “fast” social policy

The paper presents a genealogy of the Bloomberg administration’s Opportunity NYC program, launched in 2007 as part of New York City’s explicitly experimental anti-poverty strategy. Opportunity NYC was modeled on “conditional cash transfer” programs, currently operating in more than thirty countries across the Global South, drawing direct inspiration from Mexico’s widely touted Oportunidades program. This striking case of South-North policy emulation calls attention to some distinctive features of what is characterized here as a transnationalizing “fast-policy” regime, based on technocratic forms of program evaluation and development, dense expert networks, and orchestrated communities of practice, within which a range of policy intermediaries—particularly those connected with multilateral agencies—are assuming significant new roles. What appears to be a pragmatic form of policy learning in fact operates in the context of narrow ideological parameters, within which there is a concerted technocratic “push” toward favored solutions.

The Roles of State Departments of Education As Policy Intermediaries: Two Cases

As the variety of state education agency (SEA) responses to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 demonstrates, different SEAs interpret the same federal educational policy differently. Nonetheless, little research has depicted how federal policies are changed by SEA-based policy intermediaries. Using an “ethnography of educational policy” approach, this article offers two illustrations of mediation processes at the SEA level: Maine’s and Puerto Rico’s initial attempts to implement the federal Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program. Both attempts show that the mediation process is inevitable and that its general direction can be predicted: Policies will be adapted in ways that better correspond with local problem diagnoses, understandings, and habits of action. The study leaves intact McLaughlin’s assertion that local negotiation and reframing of policy can be a source of improvement or added value. Such improvement is more likely if an expectation of mediation is explicitly accounted for and if what counts as improvement reflects local mores.

Regulatory Monetary Policy and Uncontrolled Financial Intermediaries

Swedish financial markets, in particular the money market, have developed very rapidly during the 1980s. Concurrently, there has been an equally drastic change in the conduct of monetary policy and a shift away from the previous reliance on regulatory policy instruments. This deregulation of markets and policy is the starting point for this dissertation, which discusses various aspects of the behavior of the money market and how interest rates and other financial variables are affected by monetary policy. A major topic in the dissertation is the question of international interest rate dependence, i.e., the extent to which independent control of domestic monetary variables is possible. This problem, which is important both for monetary policy and for the understanding of the money market in general, is analyzed theoretically using models of international asset pricing. The discussion emphasizes the role of the foreign exchange risk premium in the relation between domestic and foreign interest rates. A detailed study is also made of a currency basket system and its implications for the risk premium and the interest rate dependence. Another important topic is the relation between interest rates on assets with different times to maturity, i.e., the term structure of interest rates. The behavior of the term structure in the Swedish money market is studied with special emphasis on the role of interest rate expectations. Among the problems addressed is also the role of discount window policies, i.e., the conditions under which banks are allowed to borrow reserves from the central bank. The analysis focuses on what these rules imply for the behavior of interest rates and the effects of various policy instruments, and on how discount window policies should be designed to improve monetary control.

MONETARY POLICY AND FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES: THE HIRE PURCHASE FINANCE HOUSES1

Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Economics & StatisticsVolume 25, Issue 1 p. 11-46 MONETARY POLICY AND FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES: THE HIRE PURCHASE FINANCE HOUSES† M. J. ARTIS, M. J. ARTISSearch for more papers by this author M. J. ARTIS, M. J. ARTISSearch for more papers by this author First published: February 1963 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.1963.mp25001002.x † 1The practice will be observed, in the references given, of referring to Oral Minutes of Evidence to the Committee on the Working of the Monetary System (Radcliffe Committee) as RE, to the Memoranda of Evidence as RM; and to the Committee's report as the Radcliffe Report, or simply, the Report. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume25, Issue1February 1963Pages 11-46 RelatedInformation