Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Although rulemaking receives far less press and attention than the legislative process, it is at least as wide-ranging and consequential in terms of setting policy agendas and shaping resultant policy outcomes. USED has clear authority to issue regulations covering every dimension of education under the federal government’s jurisdiction. And, once finalized, these regulations hold the same legal authority as a law passed by Congress and signed by the president. As such, the regulatory process plays an important role in shaping policy that shapes the educational contexts and experiences of the more than 50 million students attending the nation’s public schools.

This paper leverages the rulemaking process to gain insight into the scope and dynamics of the education policy agenda, as well as how organizations—both within the bureaucracy and outside of it—work to shape that agenda. More specifically, we use comments on proposed regulations that we topic-code at the paragraph level to gain insight into two main topics: 1) The structure of the regulatory agenda of education, specifically the dimensionality of the agenda and the relationships of particular policy topics to those dimensions, and 2) The location of commenting groups (e.g. teachers unions, state education agencies, advocacy organizations) within the agenda space.

The empirical foundation for this analysis is a sample of 5,314 paragraphs spanning 495 comments by 277 different groups on 35 different proposed rules that we topic-coded by hand. Using these data, we estimate a factor mixture model that identifies three dimensions of the regulatory agenda, which we term as 1) The Legacy/Postsecondary Aid Agenda, 2) The K-12 Reform Agenda, and 3) The College and Career Readiness Agenda. Locating commenting groups within the agenda space reveals the importance of higher education institutions in defining the Legacy/Postsecondary Aid Agenda and state education agencies in anchoring the K-12 Reform Agenda.

Compared to prior work on agenda setting, our approach has the advantage of allowing us to study regulatory topics at a much finer level of detail—one that better reflects the actual nature of substantive policy debates. Additionally, the findings have clear implications for measuring regulatory agenda change within specific policy areas, as well as understanding of group coalitions and competition within the regulatory policy environment.