Policy Expansion of School Choice in the American States, 1991-2005

This research study explored the policy expansion of school choice within the methodological approach of event history analysis. The first section provided a comparative overview of state adoption of public school choice laws. After creating a statistical portrait of the contemporary landscape for school choice, the authors introduced event history analysis as a methodological solution to the problem of measuring policy expansion. Building on previous studies in the social science literature, we discussed political, economic, and social factors related to the passage of charter school laws. A multivariate analysis found state adoption was significantly related to partisan gubernatorial control, classroom spending, private schools, education finance litigation, and minority representation. The final section discussed the empirical results in the modern policy environment and proposed future directions for comparative state research. This publication archive contains political and economic variables related to the policy diffusion of charter school laws in the United States. We present the longitudinal data collection to help social scientists replicate our event history analysis and compare the statistical results with previous studies of public school choice laws. This data collection features statistical indicators from federal government agencies and policy organizations. Our research design utilizes the standard definitions for several variables in the Common Core of Data, a national survey of local school districts and schools conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics at the United States Department of Education, and the Private School Universe Survey. We supplemented the state educational variables with cross-sectional observations of median per capita income from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and related political and economic variables from the political science literature.