GPL Report: Educational Research and the Politics of Budgets and Organization
Abstract
GPL Report Educational Research and the Politics of Budgets and Organization DAVID H. FLORIO, AERA President Reagan has intensified his challenge to the federal government's role in education. Calling for an additional 12 percent cut below his original fiscal year (FY) 1982 education budget, 30 percent under the summer's budget-cutting Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, and the hastened demise of the Education Department (ED), Reagan initiated a fall season of battles over the federal presence in education. Research and data gathering are considered, by those of various political persuasions, legitimate components of the federal education role. This consensus, however, does not change the vulnerability of educational inquiry to practical budgetary politics on Capitol Hill. Currently, no clear majority has emerged in Congress to define the level of support and extent of the federal role. During the transition between the educational programs of the past 15 years and the administration's proposed diminution of (some say "disengagement from") federal education functions, the case for educational research must be made in a "zerosum" fiscal policy arena. This leaves research programs in a budgetary "squeeze play" between the general push to reduce federal spending and those who would sacrifice some programs