Legitimating Education Policy: The Use of Special Committees in Formulating Policies in the USA and the UK.

Using examples from the United States (U.S.) and the United Kingdom (U.K.), the authors investigate the use of special or expert commissions in government policy-making in education. They analyze such commissions' impacts, the criticisms made of them, their role in political legitimation, and some alternative instruments for policy formation. After a brief introduction the paper presents past and present opinions in the U.S. and the U.K. on commissions (chiefly noneducational ones) and their utility. The authors then look in detail at the role of three U.S. and five U.K. educational commissions of the 1960's and 1970's, examining their reports and the results of their recommendations. The U.S. reports are the California Master Plan on Higher Education, the Bundy report on New York City, and the Kerr report on higher education; the U.K. documents include the Robbins, Plowden, James, Auld, and Taylor reports. The paper's following section places educational commissions within the larger context of political policy-making and discusses the extent to which commissions are legitimated and the extent to which they legitimate particular policies. The final section considers such alternatives to commissions as legislative committees, think tanks, one-person studies, political parties' research groups, and academic studies. (RW)