How governance of K-12 education influences policy outputs and student outcomes in the United States

Even though K-12 education policy has become an increasingly salient topic in the United States, few individuals understand the diverse arrangements states have devised to govern America's schools. Describing that variability and then using it to explain student academic success and state policy production is this paper’s empirical goal. That focus provides a new test of institutional theories of executive power in policy networks, which predict that more powerful executives in less fragmented networks are likely to produce desirable outputs and outcomes. The results strongly suggest that states perform better when governors are empowered to appoint leaders of state education agencies, but that performance wanes if governors can appoint agency leaders and members of state education boards. The results are more mixed regarding education finances, where fragmentation has inconsistent impacts on student academic success, but does appear to attenuate effective policy production. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 31 to September 3, 2006 in Philadelphia, PA. I owe many thanks to Diane O’Hara of the William and Mary Class of 2005, David Kysilko and David Griffith at the National Association of State Boards of Education, David Shreve and Kae Warnock at the National Conference of State Legislatures, and audiences at Brown University and the Government Accountability Office.