The Study Of The Change In American Educational Policy Research

America, as the original country of public policy research, has a specific advantage on the study of policy. Educational policy which is one part of the policy research has also developed to a certain level. This thesis attempts to analyze the existing research of U.S. educational policy from a dynamic perspective. The author expects to find out the changes of American policy research and provide new ideas and methods to educational policy research of China.This thesis chooses "Educational Policy Journal" as the object of study and selects all the articles from 1987 to 2008(total 584) as the object of the text analysis. Besides, using the word processing software Wordsmith to count the word frequency in the title directory of the 584 selected articles and pick out the high-frequency words that can reflect the main themes of the articles. Based on these high-frequency words, the author found that all these articles focus mainly on four themes:values, power, education reform and educational policy theory.Through the study, the author finds that the changes of American educational policy research lie in the following four points:Firstly, the value orientation of educational policy studies turned from emphasizing equity only to both of equity and quality. In addition, as the time passing by, the researchers' views of equity and quality also changed which included the shift from paying attention to the equity of the vulnerable groups to all members, from stressing the equity of having basic education opportunities to sharing higher education resource, from concentrating on the quality of teacher to students' academic achievements and from different quality to an unified quality.Secondly, the changes of the research point of power in education include the changes of power among governments or between government and external authority. The changes of research point of power between the governments mainly included the leadership authority shifted from state government to federal government, the executive power of education policy from federal government to state government and the financial power shifted from local government to state government. The changes of research point of power between government and external authority mainly refer to the researchers'study point of view of government power shifted from government power to school power and social power.Thirdly, the changes in the studies of reform included that school reform has become the main contents of education reform; the bottom-up reform has attracted more attention of the researchers and the coordination of education reform policy has become a new study point.Fourthly, the changes in the study of education policy theory were that the implementation of policies has gradually become the focus of education policy theory research, and the impact of education research on educational policy process become stronger and stronger.For these changes, the author attributes them to the following aspects:the changes of United States educational policy; various trends of educational thought; various social movements; the development of public policy disciplines.