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PRIVATE SCHOOL CHOICE AT THE STATE LEVEL:
DIVERSITY AND SUCCESS
by
Matthew Daniel Jones
________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(POLITICAL SCIENCE)
December 2010
Copyright 2010 Matthew Daniel Jones
Object Description
| Title | Private school choice at the state level: diversity and success |
| Author | Jones, Matthew Daniel |
| Author email | matthedj@usc.edu; mdjones75@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Politics & International Relations |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2010-12 |
| Date submitted | 2010 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2010-11-29 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Barnes, John E. |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Wong, Janelle S. Picus, Lawrence |
| Abstract | The idea of using publicly funded vouchers to subsidize parents’ ability to pick and choose education providers has been part of the contemporary policy debate for decades. Beginning in the 1990s, this private school choice idea began to be translated into specific legislative proposals showing up on the agenda of state legislatures with increasing frequency, with a few states going so far as to enact some form of private school choice law. Yet, scholarship on the issue has remained focused on debating the substance, advocates, and constituencies of the general private school choice idea and little attention has been directed toward understanding the diverse landscape of actual legislation driving attempts to introduce private school choice reform into state education policies.; To what extent does different legislation present policy designs with distinct implications for changing existing public school policy arrangements and for the chances of a bill becoming enacted into law?; This work uses an originally dataset of individual pieces of private school choice legislation introduced into state legislatures from 1997 to 2007. Thus allowing it to capture and analyze distinctions in private school choice policy design, the frequency of individual bill introductions across state legislative venues, and the influence of both policy design and venue context on individual bill enactment chances.; The analysis reveals that the private school choice idea has been incorporated into legislation in a diverse range of different policy designs, and that bills were introduced into and considered by state legislatures in very uneven patterns. Logit estimation indicated that the legislation most likely to get enacted into law tended to be designed to restrict eligibility to students with a learning disability, or designed with specific and restrictive funding or participation caps, and was introduced into states with comparatively weaker public school systems and Republican controlled governments. Overall the analysis suggests legislative policy design matters to bill enactment even more then partisan politics but that legislative dynamics are so complex and idiosyncratic that they defy easy explanation at the quantitative level.; Although the analysis largely confirmed a conventional understanding of policy change as being complex, incremental, and path dependent, I argue that a systematic study of individual pieces of private school choice legislation was also able to usefully: a) identify certain bill content designs that more effectively communicate the limited and supplemental nature of a reform proposal and influence bill success chances at the margins and; b) reveal patterns of legislative activity across policy venues that defy conventional wisdom, point to new puzzles of private school choice reform advocacy, and identify more promising state cases for comparative analysis. |
| Keyword | school choice; vouchers; education reform; policy change; state policy innovation; legislative success |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Coverage date | 1997/2007 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3564 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Jones, Matthew Daniel |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Jones-4213 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume44/etd-Jones-4213.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | PRIVATE SCHOOL CHOICE AT THE STATE LEVEL: DIVERSITY AND SUCCESS by Matthew Daniel Jones ________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (POLITICAL SCIENCE) December 2010 Copyright 2010 Matthew Daniel Jones |
