Describes a survey of department chairs of the public two-year colleges in Tennessee, which investigated the degree to which administrators understand strategic planning and feel their institutions are practicing strategic planning, and the implications of observed discrepancies between the perceived and actual practice of strategic planning. (DMM)

Federal education policy in recent years has encouraged state and local education agencies to embrace data use and analysis in decision-making, ranging from policy development and implementation to performance evaluation. The capacity of these agencies to make effective and methodologically sound use of collected data for these purposes remains an…