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Utilizing data from an original survey of public school parents, I examine the depth and distribution of parents’ knowledge of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). A close exploration of parents’ NCLB knowledge, policy-based experiences, and policy evaluations suggests that a superficial policy understanding may contribute to low uptake of policy-related opportunities and the lack of organized political response to perceived policy pitfalls. Though several other policy initiatives have now been layered atop this particular legislative act, given the policy’s reach and scope, and reliance on parents’ participation, a more careful understanding of NCLB’s effects also suggests how future policy reforms might be tailored to better encourage parent awareness of and participation in the school improvement process.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was adopted by forty-five states and heralded by supporters from both sides of the political aisle. Four years later, several states have rescinded their support and dozens more have introduced legislation to reconsider or limit participation. While standard explanations for opposition have focused on Republican state legislators and conservative ideological groups and emphasized concerns about a perceived loss of local control, our analysis reveals that opposition to the standards shifted considerably over time, engaging these groups and issues initially but expanding to include Democratic policymakers and their allies as implementation proceeded. A range of issues that were largely ignored when the initiative was adopted, including concerns over cost, teacher evaluation, accountability, and student privacy were brought to the fore as the policy had to be reconciled with existing systems and institutions. This analysis has implications for scholars tracing policy change in a federal system by revealing the centrality of implementation to understanding how political conflict evolves over time.

Interdistrict open enrollment is the nation’s largest and most widespread school choice program, but our knowledge of these programs is limited. Drawing on 5 years of student-level data from the universe of public school attendees in Colorado, we perform a three-stage analysis to examine the dynamics of student participation in the state’s interdistrict open enrollment program. First, we explore the characteristics of students who open enroll in a defined baseline year. Second, we analyze the characteristics of students who continue to participate in the program in subsequent years. Finally, we examine the characteristics of students who—conditional on not open enrolling in the defined-baseline year—choose to participate in the program in one or more subsequent years.

In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievement. We perform this analysis using a 10-year panel dataset from Minnesota, a state that permits four distinct types of authorizers—local school boards, postsecondary institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the Minnesota Department of Education. The results of the analysis indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between charter school authorizing type and mean levels of student achievement. However, the analysis also reveals that schools authorized by nonprofit organizations exhibit substantially more variability in achievement than schools authorized by local school boards.

Interdistrict open enrollment is the most widely used form of school choice in the United States. Through the theoretical lens of a utility maximization framework, this article analyzes the determinants of interdistrict open enrollment flows in Minnesota and Colorado. The authors’ empirical analysis employs an original data set that details open enrollment flows between all pairwise combinations of school districts within 100 miles of each other in these two states. These flows are merged with demographic and geographic data from the Common Core of Data and U.S. Census Bureau. The findings indicate that open enrollment flows are driven mainly by student achievement and structural characteristics of districts; distance plays a large constraining role. The results also suggest that most transfers take place between relatively high-achieving districts. The authors discuss the policy implications of these findings.