Street-Level Bureaucrats and Institutional Innovation: Implementing Special-Education Reform

Abstract

Recent state and federal legislation holds the promise of sweeping reform in special-education practices. In this article, Richard Weatherley and Michael Lipsky examine the implementation of Chapter 766, the dramatically innovative state special-education law in Massachusetts. They show how the necessary coping mechanisms that individual school personnel use to manage the demands of their jobs may, in the aggregate, constrain and distort the implementation of special-education reform. Their findings have serious implications for those seeking to introduce policy innovations in service bureaucracies of all kinds where the deliverers of service exercise substantial discretion in setting their work priorities.