Federal Policy Trade-Offs Between Equity and Efficiency.

Overview & Synopsis

This paper discusses potential trade-offs between equity and efficiency as they pertain to the implementation of federal policy in education. It is the policy analyst's role, the paper says, to investigate the existence and magnitude of such trade-offs in a manner most useful for policy-making. The first section reviews the rationale for a federal role in education. The second section briefly describes the characteristics of the current federal role. The third describes how and why the objectives of equity and efficiency apply to federal education policy. The subsequent section discusses Title I of the Elementary Secondary Education Act, as an example of federal policy in education. The final section reviews the findings of an empirical analysis of Title I as it applies to the question of assessing equity and efficiency trade-offs in federal education policies. (Author)