J. Martin Rochester

What Foreign Policy Makers Want From Foreign Policy Researchers

In an effort to address the question of how scholarly research products can be made more relevant to foreign policy makers, the authors undertake a systematic analysis of government-sponsored external research on foreign affairs to determine the kinds of products in which practitioners are most interested. Beyond mapping the foreign affairs external research domain to determine the nature of the scholarly products sought by policy makers, the study compares the funding emphases of various agencies that have foreign affairs interests to see to what extent these emphases reflect different research orientations, as well as a distinctiveness of missions among the members of the foreign policy establishment. Two basic conclusions are drawn from the study. First, contrary to much conventional wisdom, the foreign policy establishment supports a substantial amount of research that is basic (as opposed to applied), global in scope (as opposed to regionally specific), international in disciplinary orientation (as opposed to national or cross-national), and temporally open-ended (as opposed to immediate). There is no indication from this study that scholarly research would be more supported and used by policy makers if it were more problem-specific. Second, one must be careful in generalizing about the research needs of foreign affairs practitioners insofar as there is considerable differentiation among agencies with respect to the nature of the scholarly products in which they are interested.

Why Continuous Improvement Is a Poor Substitute for School Choice.

ABSTRACT Efforts to introduce school choice have produced pressures on public schools to improve their performance. As a result, many public schools have embraced the total quality management principle of continuous improvement. In this article we explain that while this may be well intentioned, it may have perverse unintended consequences. A likely by-product of adopting this principle is the degradation of school performance because of an asymmetry of incentives that leads to a systematic bias in the evaluation of the efficacy of new innovations. In short, there is pressure to avoid or abandon innovations that educators oppose even if such innovations improve academic performance, while there is pressure to adopt or continue innovations that educators favor even if they do not improve performance. Anecdotal evidence is presented that is consistent with the argument.