Interest Groups in American Education

agreement that they play a significant part in all political decision-making. At the same time there has been wide discussion in education journals of the importance of the political context in shaping national education systems. These two developments have caused many research workers in education to study the role of interest groups in the formation of education policies (for example, Crain, Hodgson, lannaccone & Lutz, Kirst, Masotti, Rogers). [2] The United States is not unique in possessing a large number of groups focused on education. The same phenomenon may be observed in most countries. It is possible that the groups are more numerous in relation to population, and that they are more active in the United States. Certainly American interest groups publish more material than those in other countries, and presumably for that reason alone have more opportunity to influence public opinion on educational issues. It is an axiom of interest group politics that the structure of the groups reflects the structure of real power in any nation. [3] The groups shape their own organizations to generate maximum political power at the level at which decisions relating to their goals are being made. It is no surprise therefore that interest groups in American education display the same complexity and instability that characterizes the real power structure in the governance of education in the United States. The formal authority structure places legal control of schools in the hands of the State governments, with much of this control legally delegated to local school boards. By tradition, the Federal Government dealt with specific aspects of education which were of national interest. Recent decades have seen the actual power structure move away from this arrangement. An untidy and shifting web of inter-governmental agreements has developed. The Federal Government no longer makes funds available for a few limited and clearly defined purposes. It pours money into so many hundreds of projects that State and local authorities need to employ teams of experts to seek and control grants of Federal money. State governments have moved from their relative disinterest in education to active control or searching probing of many spheres of school board operations. School boards have become involved with city governments with problems

Comparative education · Economic growth · Economics · Higher education · Political science · Sociology · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

• Interest Groups in Education

  Open Access•Richard W Saxe•Education and Urban Society•1981

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• The Education Establishment

  Reynaldo R Baca, Elizabeth Useem et al.•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1976

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• Interest Groups in American Society

  David L Sills, Harmon Zeigler•American Sociological Review•1965

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