This collection of essays is a case study of a major educational reform enacted in Texas in 1987: an effort to test all entering college students to gauge their basic skills. The contributors were involved in implementing this reform, which aims to remedy academic deficiencies among college students and to retain students through graduation. The book chronicles how legislators, staff and educators designed the test, program, and necessary policies to support the reform.

The essays in this book chronicle the work of legislators, staff, and educators in implementing House Bill 2182, which requires testing for all entering college students and mandates developmental education for students who fail to meet the established criteria. Among the issues discussed are test development, minority concerns, prevention of bias, handicapped needs, and program evaluation. "From Politics to Policy" presents a model for other states to emulate, and is valuable to students and teachers of education, policy analysis and psychometric testing, as well as to agencies and legislators involved in state-level educational reform.

The suggestion by Dr. Franklin S. Harris, Jr., that these books be written arose pursuant to the editor's plaints that despite the implicitly or explicitly ack nowledged importance of both aerosols and particulate matter in innumerable domains of technology and human welfare, investigations of these subjects were generally not supported independently of the narrowest conceivable domains of their appli cations. Frank Harris, who has long been a contributor in one of the important domains of aerosol macrophysics, atmospheric optics, challenged the editor to elaborate his views. Ideally, they would have taken the form of a monograph; however, there is as yet an insufficient body of information to present a unified treatment. At the same time, substantial efforts are in progress in the component fields to hold the promise for the emergence of unifying elements which will even tually facilitate their presentation to be made with a high degree of integrity. There are numerous pertinent and systematic tie-ins between project-oriented aerosol work and basic physical investigations which are themselves quite closely akin to much classical and current work in physical science. The most significant aspect of these tie-ins is their potential for making substantial contributions to the functional needs of the applications areas while stimulating significant questions of basic physics. For this to be possible, it is necessary that the most relevant areas of physics be identified in such a manner as to make clear their re levance for aerosol-related studies and vice versa."