Law and Policy Entrepreneurs: Empirical Evidence on the Expansion of School Choice Policy

This study leverages event history analysis to help explain the expansion of public charter school legislation between 1991-2006. This study expands previous work in two important ways. First, while critical distinctions separate public charter school and school voucher programs, both fall comfortably within the broader rubric of "school choice." As such, it is difficult to understand the development of state legislation for one school choice variant independent of the other. Thus, this analysis includes the presence of publicly- or privately-funded voucher programs in a state as a possible factor influencing the adoption of charter school legislation in a state. Second, a methodological contribution emerges by comparing results generated by a complementary log-log model with results generated by a rare event logistic regression model. That school voucher programs' influence on the emergence of state charter schools laws is robust across both models underscores school voucher programs' salience to the emergence of charter school legislation. Understanding the emergence of charter school legislation as a defensive political move to deflect school voucher progress or a political compromise finds support in these results. Either interpretation of the emergence of charter schools' ascendance, however, needs to account for the school voucher programs' influence as well as important suburban political and economic interests. INTRODUCTION As Americans' impulse and appetite for school reform endure, so too does the public education system's resistance to helpful, structural change. As one leading education critic and scholar, Diane Ravitch, noted recently: "It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis." (1) Moreover, this "well-known" fact is not new as the American education system has remained in a crisis mode (albeit in varying degrees) for at least a century. (2) An impulse to wade into elementary and secondary school reform is broadly shared and expanded relatively recently to include the federal government. Just over a decade ago, the U.S. Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (3) ("NCLB") which represents the federal government's most dramatic venture into the nation's schools and educational policy and reform. (4) With NCLB Congress sought to leverage state accountability standards in an effort to improve academic performance in general as well as to narrow the achievement chasms that separate various student sub-groups in particular. (5) According to Frederick Hess, one early legacy of NCLB is that "'achievement gaps' became (educational) reformers' catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy." (6) To be sure, concerns over American student academic achievement and nagging differences in achievement among various student sub-groups are well-founded. (7) An international vantage point is particularly instructive as it reveals that "the performance of American students on international tests is mediocre." (8) And this American educational mediocrity prevails even though the United States outspends virtually all other nations when it comes to education. (9) With anxiety over student academic achievement (and achievement gaps) as a central current motivation for educational reform in this country, educational reform machinery continues to grind. Over the decades numerous reform strategies have come and gone. (10) Recently, perhaps owing to more specific concerns over the economic and social damage inflicted by inefficacious public schools, educational reform strategies began to soften an almost instinctive institutional aversion to market forces. Indeed, many current reform efforts now openly seek to enlist and exploit market forces, though in varying degrees, into the service of improving public schools. (11) Within the larger reform framework of subjecting public elementary and secondary institutions to increased market forces, charter schools appear to have won the battle of ideas at the moment. …