The policy-practice gap: Why good ideas get lost on the way to the classroom

Abstract

There is a particular frustration that educational researchers, policymakers, and practitioners tend to share, even when they agree on very little else. It is the experience of watching a well-designed policy, a carefully piloted program, or a theoretically sound leadership model encounter the reality of schools and universities and come back looking rather different from what was intended. The idea survives. The implementation does not, or not fully, not in the way anyone imagined when the policy was written. Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) described this problem half a century ago in their study of a federal employment program in Oakland, California, and gave it a name: the implementation gap. The label has stuck because the problem has not gone away.

Educational Management and Policy launches as a venue for research that takes implementation seriously, not as an afterthought to policy design but as a problem in its own right. The five articles in this issue come from Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Vietnam, and a comparative study of Kenya and Singapore. They do not share a methodology or a level of schooling. What they share is a confrontation with the distance between what educational policy and management theory promise and what the conditions of real institutions allow. That distance is the subject of this journal.