This paper examines the relationship between politics and education in developing nations in light of the question: "Under what conditions is educational reform successful?" The objective is to create a framework for investigating educational policies based on outcomes rather than objectives or needs. The author recommends that, in addition to technical and cultural criteria for policy, educational researchers should consider three political dimensions of policy--decision making, implementation, and effects of a given policy on a system's capacity for dealing with inevitable spin-off problems. Review of existing research on the politics of education in developing nations indicates that most researchers have concentrated on a historical-descriptive style of analysis, overemphasized data such as cross-national surveys, and underemphasized comparative case studies, analytical approaches, and research on questions such as the success or failure of particular policies. The conclusion is that major aims of comparative educational policy studies in the 1980s should be to discern regularities in the conditions that shape outcomes, examine specific policies with regard to their effects on society, and analyze conditions and settings which encourage or discourage particular types of education/policy relationships. (DB)