ABSTRACT
Public policy decisions are made through political processes involving social interactions and the use of rationalizations and research. After World War II, systems approaches developed in global defense efforts were adapted to education and social programs (Schultz, 1968), leading up to and including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Higher Education Act (HEA) as part of President Johnson’s Great Society programs. Yet throughout most of the last half of the 20th century, political and social scientists argued that political process involving social interaction-and lobbying by vested interest groups-prevailed over the espoused rationality of the policy process (Lindblom, 1959; A. Wildavsky, 1979). This tension has also been evident in analyses of higher education policy, where sociopolitical process provides a better explanation for the evolution of HEA student aid programs than does the theory of rational research-based decisions (Hearn, 1993, 2001a, 2001b). In recent decades, a sociopolitical process that involves the misuse of statistics in support of a policy agenda is common in education, as it is in other areas of public policy.
