VALUE-CRITICAL POLICY ANALYSIS 301students. Their responses to my efforts have been humbling, encouraging, and exhilarating, and
always richly rewarding.
❖❖❖In this context, the central language policy conflict is not about the continued dominance
of the English language as such, but over how the country should deal with its other
languages in public policy. And here, the primary issue is not language per se, but social
identities and their relationship to justice and the common good.
—Ronald Schmidt (2000, 224)How can systematic policy analysis respond when fundamental value disagreements make it un-
likely that analysis of “the facts” will resolve policy conflict? This chapter articulates an interpre-
tive method of policy analysis, a value-critical approach, which may be helpful in just such
situations. It does so both discursively and by example, with the latter drawn from the author’s
book Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States (R. Schmidt 2000).
In doing research on the language policy debate in the United States, I gradually came to
realize that the most important questions in this conflict are not about matters of “fact,” but about
differences of interpretation and fundamental value disputes that center on issues of identity.
What kind of “nation” is the United States? What are the ties that bind Americans to each other as
members of a nation-state? What is the role of language in creating and sustaining those ties? And
how does the public role of “language” intersect with questions of “justice” for ethno-linguistic
and ethno-racial minorities, and with questions of how to promote the “common good”?
On the one hand, I came to realize that there was little hope that scientifically rigorous “value-
neutral” policy analyses, no matter how well done, could lead to a resolution of the language
policy debate. On the other hand, I also came to realize that most articulations of the values at
stake in this issue by partisans in the debate are of the “value-committed” variety, leading almost
always to fruitless “value-smashing” exercises between the protagonists. I found myself repeat-
edly returning to the concept of value-critical policy analysis, first articulated by Martin Rein
(1976), in the hope of shedding light on what is really at stake in the U.S. language policy debate,
and how the United States might best resolve this conflict in a way that maximizes both justice for
minorities and the common good. My aim below is to share the fruits of my effort to conduct a
value-critical analysis in hopes of aiding the work of others in similar situations.
The concept of value-critical policy analysis comes from Martin Rein’s book Social Science
and Public Policy (1976). In that book, Rein distinguished this method from both value-neutral
and value-committed approaches to public policy analysis. Guided by the canons of positivist
social scientific research, the value-neutral approach takes the normative aims or goals of public
policies as given and seeks to predict (through modeling and causal analysis) which of several
alternative means of achieving a policy’s goal is most likely to succeed and at what costs. Simi-
larly, during and after a policy’s implementation value-neutral analysts attempt to describe and
explain the degree to which the policy succeeded or failed to achieve its goals.
The value-committed approach to policy analysis has a long history. Here, the analyst attempts
to justify a given policy in terms of values to which he or she is already committed by marshaling
arguments and evidence that point in that direction. Typical examples of this form of policy
analysis include the testimony of interest group representatives before legislative committees, as
well as ideologically grounded policy arguments made by scholars and public commentators.