To assess the state's role as an instrument of national education policy, researchers examined four states' responses to federal programs under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and under the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. They focused, first, on how states' political and organizational contexts interacted with…

Many children who need Title I, Elementary Secondary Education Act services are not getting them in many States because the distribution formula assigns Federal aid on the basis of figures which measure a poor substitute for educational need and then compounds the error by using 14 year old figures. That means that a State is still getting money…

In an effort to develop a comprehensive theory of the relationships between different levels of government in the implementation of federal programs, the authors of this report conducted a study of four federal programs operating in both Baltimore (Maryland) and Milwaukee (Wisconsin). Three hypotheses were tested: first, that when program goals at…