Library / Glossary / The context glossary
Education policy glossary
34 terms from C17, Education policy: making it and enacting it — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C17 · Schools and systems
Education policy: making it and enacting it
“Policy is announced, then implemented.”
Every term below is defined in the words of education policy, primer C17 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 1 term is also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | |||
| Agenda setting | The stage at which a condition becomes a problem that government will consider acting on. Kingdon (1995) treats it as the coupling of a named problem, an available solution and a favourable politics. |
| |
| Ambiguity–conflict model | Matland's model in which how clear a policy is, and how much people disagree about it, predict what decides a rollout: resources, power, local context or the strength of local coalitions (Matland, 1995). |
| |
| B | |||
| Backward mapping | A planning method that specifies the behaviour wanted at the last point of contact, then asks what each level above it would have to do to make that behaviour possible (Elmore, 1979). |
| |
| C | |||
| Campbell's law | The more a quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it is to corruption pressures and the more apt to distort the social processes it is intended to monitor (Campbell, 1979). C01 When test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways (Campbell, 1979). C14 The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort the processes it monitors (Campbell, 1979). | ||
| Capacity-building | A policy instrument defined as "the transfer of money for the purpose of investment in material, intellectual, or human resources" (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987b). It assumes the skill or kit is missing and pays for it, accepting a long wait for returns. |
| |
| E | |||
| Enlightenment model | The account in which research enters policy not as an answer to a question but as a slow accumulation of concepts, generalisations and framings that change how a problem is understood (Weiss, 1986). | ||
| Evidence-informed policy | Policy made with explicit reference to research, while acknowledging that research cannot settle questions of value, priority or timing. Usually preferred to "evidence-based" because it claims less and describes practice better (Cairney & Oliver, 2017). |
| |
| F | |||
| Fidelity against adaptation | The question of whether a programme should be delivered as designed or changed to fit its setting. Primer C11 covers it for curriculum and C23 for reform; the working answer in both is to state which parts are tight before allowing the rest to be loose (Fullan & Pomfret, 1977; Thompson & Wiliam, 2007). |
| |
| H | |||
| Hortatory tools | Policy tools that work by persuasion, exhortation, published values or symbolic action rather than by rules, money or authority. Schneider and Ingram (1990) treat them as one family of tools with their own behavioural assumptions. They are the cheapest instrument and usually the weakest. |
| |
| I | |||
| Implementation | The stage at which a decided policy is carried out. Implementation research treats it as the main source of variation in what a policy achieves, rather than as an administrative afterthought (McLaughlin, 1987; Honig, 2006). |
| |
| Implementation gap | The distance between what a policy states and what is actually delivered. Naming it is useful; treating it as pure failure is not, because some of the distance is the legitimate adaptation a policy needs to work anywhere in particular. |
| |
| Inducements | A policy instrument defined as "the transfer of money to individuals or agencies in return for certain actions" (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987b). It assumes the capacity to act already exists and the effort or attention is missing. |
| |
| M | |||
| Mandates | A policy instrument defined as "rules governing the action of individuals and agencies, intended to produce compliance" (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987b). It assumes everyone could comply if required, regardless of their differing capacities. |
| |
| Multiple streams | Kingdon's account of agenda setting as three largely independent streams (problems, policies and politics) which a policy entrepreneur joins while a window is open; a widely used framework, not a tested theory (Kingdon, 1995). |
| |
| Mutual adaptation | McLaughlin's (1976) finding that a project and its setting each change the other during implementation, and that the versions which survive are the adapted ones. | ||
| P | |||
| Path dependence | The property of a process in which early choices generate increasing returns that make later reversal expensive, so the range of live options narrows over time (Pierson, 2000). It explains both the strength of long policy lines and the difficulty of turning them. |
| |
| Pilots | Small first implementations used to find practical problems, build local expertise and refine a design before a wider rollout. A pilot in volunteer or well-prepared sites tests feasibility rather than predicting what a full rollout will produce. Primer C22 covers what an evaluation can establish. |
| |
| Policy actors | The positions staff take up towards a policy inside one school: narrators, entrepreneurs, translators, transactors, enthusiasts, critics, receivers and outsiders. They are a vocabulary for looking, not a validated typology (Ball et al., 2011). |
| |
| Policy coherence | The degree to which the instruments, messages and accountability demands reaching a school point in the same direction. Incoherence is usually experienced at the front line as overload rather than as contradiction, because contradictory demands still have to be met. |
| |
| Policy cycle | The heuristic that divides policy into agenda setting, formulation, decision, implementation and evaluation (Jann & Wegrich, 2007). Useful for teaching that policy is a process; misleading if read as a description, because the stages overlap and implementation is much larger than one box. |
| |
| Policy enactment | Ball, Maguire and Braun's (2012) term for what schools do with policy: interpret it, translate it and put it to work in a particular place with particular people, rather than simply receive and implement it. |
| |
| Policy evaluation | The stage at which a policy's effects are examined, and the point at which the cycle is supposed to feed the next agenda. In practice, evaluation often arrives after the next decision has been taken. |
| |
| Policy formulation | The stage at which options are developed and an instrument is chosen. This is where most of the consequential design happens, and where the choice of instrument is often made by habit rather than analysis. |
| |
| Policy instruments | The means by which government brings its resources to bear: rules, money for action now, money for capacity later, or authority moved to different hands (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987a). Each instrument embeds a different assumption about why the desired behaviour is absent. |
| |
| Policy translation | The work of turning a policy text into the events, routines, templates and materials that carry it in a school. Distinct from interpretation, which decides what the policy means here (Ball et al., 2012). |
| |
| Policy windows | Short openings in which a problem, a solution and a favourable politics can be coupled, so that an item reaches the agenda. Windows close, which is why a solution has to be ready before one opens (Kingdon, 1995). |
| |
| Pressure and support | McLaughlin's formulation that effective implementation needs a strategic balance of the two: pressure alone produces the appearance of change, and support alone produces drift (McLaughlin, 1987). |
| |
| S | |||
| Sensemaking | The process by which the people implementing a policy come to understand it, using what they already know and believe. Spillane, Reiser and Reimer (2002) argue that much apparent non-implementation is people faithfully enacting the version of a policy they understood. |
| |
| Stakeholder engagement | Consultation with the people a policy affects, before and during its design. Done well it improves the instrument and builds the translators a rollout needs; done as a formality it produces consent without information. |
| |
| Street-level bureaucracy | Lipsky's (1980) term for public services delivered by front-line staff — teachers, police officers, social workers — who must apply general rules to particular people with fewer resources than the demand, and whose routines and rationing become the operating policy. |
| |
| System-changing | A policy instrument defined as "the transfer of official authority among individuals and agencies to alter the system by which public goods and services are delivered" (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987b). It assumes existing institutions cannot produce the result under existing incentives. |
| |
| T | |||
| Tight–loose | A design rule that holds a few central principles fixed while allowing local accommodation elsewhere, but only where that accommodation does not conflict with the intervention's theory of action (Thompson & Wiliam, 2007). |
| |
| Top-down and bottom-up implementation | Two traditions in implementation research: one beginning from the statute and tracing compliance downwards, the other beginning from the point of contact and working upwards (Sabatier, 1986). Elmore's (1979) backward mapping is the practical form of the second. |
| |
| U | |||
| Unintended consequences | Effects a policy produces that nobody designed, especially where a number carries consequences. Campbell's (1979) law is the general statement; primer C14 covers what it does to assessment systems in detail. | ||
No term matches. Try fewer letters.
Nearby