Big Business as a Policy Innovator in State School Reform: A Minnesota Case Study

Abstract

Case study findings on the 1985 session of the Minnesota Legislature, particularly the “open enrollment” controversy, are used to analyze the Minnesota Business Partnership as a policy innovator in state school reform. This role is examined in relation to three processes: agenda setting, alternative formulation, and authoritative enactment. Pluralist involvement, not elite dominance, characterized Partnership efforts, with its chief impact being on agenda setting by the Governor’s office. Despite impressive power resources, Partnership influence was modest, a result partly of issue, arena, and organizational constraints. More fundamentally, Partnership influence was mediated through elected officials, contested by established subsystem interests, and conditioned by public acceptability. Increasingly, the Partnership has adapted to the demands of incremental politics in seeking policy innovation in Minnesota K-12 education.

Evaluation and Policy Analysis: A Communicative Framework

“…CASE STUDY projects reported in EEPA also provide clear examples of how an approach is affected by new creations, modifications, expansions and transformations of the meanings of its functions. Researchers such as Bissell (1979), Monti (1979), Mercurio (1979), Kirst and Jung (1980), Porter (1983), and Mazzoni and Clugston (1987), have formulated arguments regarding the usefulness of identifying how variable strategies of administration enable a new policy to be introduced into a school district's routines while change is avoided; how field study techniques used in case studies could provide a sense of expanding dimensions of citizen involvement mandated in a variety of compensatory education programs; how case studies can be useful for identifying the language of state-wide reform efforts and policy enactment variables and mapping relations among these variables; and, how use of an interactionist perspective in doing case studies would result in documentation of different interpretations of an education innovation rather than reporting one "correct" interpretation or description.…”