School Choice Acceptance: An Exploratory Explication

Abstract

School choice is presented by some as a panacea to the challenges facing education in the United States. Acceptance of choice as a solution, however, is far from universal. This article examines two possible contributors to choice adoption: ideology and political culture. Political culture was found to better explain the complex phenomenon of choice adoption than political ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• school choice adoption
• state political ideology
• political culture

Notes

1. The OEP measure here considers only those states that have a statewide mandatory policy of allowing students to choose a school regardless of whether it is inside or outside of their school district. Seventeen states have such a policy for all their students while three states have the policy applicable only to students from low-income households. In some other states, there are school districts that have enacted intradistrict open enrollment policy. However, because some districts may be very homogenous in terms of school quality and student demographics, it may not represent real choice available. Furthermore, these districts lack any statewide mandate and therefore are not included here.

2. Some control variables are correlated with others, however, multicollinearity is not a problem (O’Sullivan, Rassel, & Berner, 2003, p. 44).