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For both proponents and critics alike, among the most salient features of charter schooling today is their freedom from collective bargaining agreements that shape staffing and work rules and limit...

In this paper, we draw upon in-depth interviews with teachers and administrators in 18 unionized charter schools around the country to investigate teachers’ motivations for unionization. Our results suggest that while mismanagement and distrust are often the proximate cause of charter unionization efforts, both material and purposive goals—greater job security and pay as well as increased voice in school decision-making—power organization drives and contract negotiations. Our evidence suggests unionization and collective bargaining agreements can create more transparency around pay and development, which teachers desired. But, sometimes unionization carried unanticipated risks for administrators—salaries increased faster than revenues and teacher development became constrained by newly formed collective bargaining agreements.

Objective Analyze achievement trajectories of students who transfer out of their district of residence via Colorado's interdistrict open enrollment policy. Methods Drawing on a data set containing annual individual‐level records from the universe of students attending Colorado public schools between 2005–2006 and 2009–2010, we estimate the achievement trajectories of open enrollment participants via ordinary least squares (OLS) models containing student fixed effects. Results and Conclusion Our analyses indicate that the achievement of open enrollment participants gradually declines in the years leading up to their transfer. After open enrolling, students whose participation is stable through the duration they are observed in our data exhibit small achievement gains, but those who reenroll in their district of residence exhibit additional small declines. On average, those who use open enrollment as a long‐term education option tend to enroll in districts that are more advantaged on traditional measures of educational quality than their district of residence.

Over the past three decades, a reform movement bent on improving schools and educational outcomes through standards-based accountability systems and market-like competitive pressures has dominated policy debates. Many have examined reform policies’ effects on academic outcomes, but few have explored these policies’ influence on citizens’ political orientations. In this study, using data from an original survey, I examine whether and how No Child Left Behind’s accountability-based architecture influences parents’ attitudes towards the government and federal involvement in education. I find little evidence that diversity in parents’ lived policy experiences shapes their political orientations. However, the results of a survey experiment suggest that information linking school experience to policy and government action may increase parents’ confidence in their ability to contribute to the political process. Understanding whether and under what conditions parents use public school experiences to inform orientations towards the government can improve the design of future reforms.

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.

Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures, like experience and qualifications, as well as output measures, like value-added estimates of teacher performance, but these tend to focus on either individual measures of teacher quality or particular school districts. In this study, we present a comprehensive, descriptive analysis of the inequitable distribution of both input and output measures of teacher quality across various indicators of student disadvantage across all school districts in Washington State. We demonstrate that in elementary school, middle school, and high school classrooms, virtually every measure of teacher quality we examine—experience, licensure exam scores, and value added—is inequitably distributed across every indicator of student disadvantage—free/reduced-price lunch status, underrepresented minority, and low prior academic performance. Finally, we decompose these inequities to the district, school, and classroom levels and find that patterns in teacher sorting at all three levels contribute to the overall teacher quality gaps.

Social capital is a central concept in social science research, and it is measured in diverse ways. Few measurement approaches take the network structure of complex institutional settings into account. In this study, using data from a large-scale school-based randomized field trial, we develop several factor analytic models to test the validity and reliability of a new survey battery capturing multiple dimensions of social capital in such settings. We demonstrate that it is important to account for institutional and network structure in social capital measures, and we show how social capital can be operationalized as the shared variance between different relational characteristics in complex settings with multiple subnetworks.

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.

A large literature on teacher collective bargaining describes the potential influence of the provisions in collectively bargained teacher union contracts on teachers and student achievement, but little is known about what influences the provisions that end up in these contracts. Using a unique data set made up of every active teacher collective bargaining agreement in Washington State, the authors estimate spatial lag models to explore the relationship between the restrictiveness of a bargained contract in one district and the restrictiveness of contracts in nearby districts. Employing various measures of geographic and institutional proximity, they find that spatial relationships play a major role in determining bargaining outcomes. These spatial relationships, however, are actually driven by two “institutional bargaining structures”: education service districts (ESDs), which support school districts, and UniServ councils, which determine who is bargaining on behalf of local teachers’ unions. This finding suggests that the influence of geographic distance found in previous studies of teacher wages may simply reflect the influence of these bargaining structures.

I present the results of an original survey experiment designed to understand the complex relationship between policy information, attitudes, and evaluation. Parents of children attending schools identified for improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) are exposed to basic, context-specific, policy information on a randomized basis and then asked to complete an attitudinal survey. Treatment parents are significantly more likely than control group peers to report familiarity with NCLB and correctly identify the policy status of their child’s school. An increased depth of policy understanding enables these parents to bring evaluations of their child’s educational experience, policy, and government into alignment. Findings demonstrate the potential for careful policy framing and delivery to encourage enlightened opinion formation and political participation.

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.

Several decades of scholarship suggest that by covering male and female candidates differently, the news media may influence the success of female candidates for higher office. I employ a content analysis to assess gender differences in the local television news coverage of 172 U.S. House candidates in the nation's top 50 media markets in 2002. The results of the study suggest that female candidates for the U.S. House were covered with the same frequency as male candidates, and received equitable issue-based and personal coverage. Related Articles Bode, Leticia, and Valerie M. Hennings. 2012. “Mixed Signals? Gender and the Media's Coverage of the 2008 Vice Presidential Candidates.” Politics & Policy 40 (2): 221-257. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00350.x/abstract Jalalzai, Farida. 2006. “Women Candidates and the Media: 1992-2000 Elections.” Politics & Policy 34 (3): 606-633. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2006.00030.x/abstract Related Media Film Clip: Women's Media Center. 2008. “Sexism Sells—But We're Not Buying It.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-IrhRSwF9U Datasets: Center for American Women and Politics. 2013. http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/

This article identifies two key constructs likely to influence implementation of federal policy. It theorizes that states' institutional capacity and political will may constrain or facilitate application of national initiatives, and offers a way to reorganize implementation analyses. The argument is applied in the education policy arena using several years of data to examine how resources and political will influence state test rigor under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). We hypothesize that better resourced and more conservative states are less likely to develop rigorous exams. Using a multilevel model, we find that state-level capacity and political will (notably state-level partisanship and preexisting accountability regimes) explain a substantial portion of variance in response to NCLB. These findings suggest in particular that implementation researchers should more often take note of explicitly political factors like state partisanship to anticipate how layers of government interact as they translate policy into practice. Related Articles: Patrick, Barbara. 2012. “Performance Policies, Needs, and Expectancy Theory: Are States Using Performance Policies to Build Highly Functional Workforces?” Politics & Policy 40 (4): 592-627. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00370.x/abstract McGrath, Robert J. 2009. “Implementation Theory Revisited … Again: Lessons from the State Children's Health Insurance Program.” Politics & Policy 37 (2): 309-336. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2009.00174.x/abstract Grady, Dennis O., and Kathleen M. Simon. 2002. “Political Restraints and Bureaucratic Discretion: The Case of State Government Rule Making.” Politics & Policy 30 (4): 646-679. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2002.tb00139.x/abstract Related Media: Film Clip: Hamilton. 2012. “No Child Left Behind: Ten Years Later.” RAND Multimedia . http://www.rand.org/multimedia/video/2012/01/05/no-child-left-behind.html Various Resources: RAND Corporation. 2012. “NCLB.” RAND Education . http://www.rand.org/topics/nclb.html Identificamos dos factores que posiblemente influencian la implementacion de politicas federales. Argumentamos que la capacidad institucional y la voluntad politica de los estados puede restringir o facilitar la aplicacion de iniciativas nacionales, y ofrecemos una forma de reorganizar los analisis de implementacion. Aplicamos nuestro argumento al area de las politicas educativas usando informacion de muchos anos para examinar la influencia de los recursos y la voluntad politica estatal en el rigor de las pruebas en la iniciativa No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Nuestra hipotesis es que estados con mejores recursos y mas conservadores son menos probables a desarrollar examenes rigurosos. Usando un modelo multinivel, encontramos que la capacidad a nivel estatal y la voluntad politica (en particular el nivel de partidismo estatal y niveles pre-existentes de responsabilidad) pueden explicar una cantidad significativa en la variacion de respuesta a NCLB.

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.