Paul Teske

Networks to Nowhere: Segregation and Stratification in Networks of Information about Schools

Theory: Public sector reforms expanding citizen choice are hypothesized to create many of the benefits of private markets, in part by increasing the incentives of citizens to search for information about the quality of public services. Social scientists have shown that networks can provide valuable shortcuts to the information necessary to participate in this expanded market for public goods. Critics of public sector markets argue, however, that choice will heighten existing inequalities, increasing stratification by education and income and racial segregation. This criticism is particularly evident in debates about school choice. Hypothesis: The quality of networks in school districts with choice is hypothesized to be higher than in school districts without choice and to increase with parental education levels. Networks are also hypothesized to be segregated by race. In addition, differences in networks as a function of education and the segregation of networks by race may be greater in choice districts than in districts with no or little choice. Methods: Two stage generalized least square techniques are used to predict the quality of discussants and racial patterns in education networks while controlling for the problem of nonrandom assignment inherent in different levels of parental involvement in school choice. Results: Higher socioeconomic status individuals are more likely to have higher quality education networks. Education networks also exhibit a high degree of racial segregation. Institutional incentives do not markedly affect the nature of information networks about education-but where effects are found, they tend to indicate higher levels of class stratification and racial segregation.

Interests and Institutions in State Regulation

Social scientists have not yet developed and tested a satisfactory explanation of the causes of deregulation of American industry because there are too few federal cases for quantitative analysis. This article compares interest group and institutional theories, using state telecommunications regulation after the AT&T divestiture in 1984 as a laboratory. All state public utility commissions faced similar policy choices in a short period of time. The logistic regression analyses of state decisions about rate structures and competitive entry show that institutional factors, including regulatory resources, ideology, and legislative party control, have more influence than interest group pressure. The article recommends using the larger number of cases and wider variance in state policies generally to understand institutional choice.

Institutions and Reform Reinventing Local Government

During the past few years, a new wave of reform has been launched under the rubric of reinventing government. Yet, despite the hype, little is known about the extent to which reinventing government is a reality across the country. The authors undertake a systematic analysis of reform activity in a large sample of suburban municipalities and find low rates of adoption of current reforms. Although a number of identifiable and theoretically important institutional constraints inhibit reform activity, city manager leadership appears to be critical for overcoming the impediments to efficient governance.

Heuristics, Low Information Rationality, and Choosing Public Goods Broken Windows as Shortcuts to Information about School Performance

The United States is in the midst of a reform movement empowering parents to choose among an expanded set of schools for their children. Inherent in these reforms is the idea that parents will gather the information necessary to make informed choices from among the set. Opponents of school choice argue that lower-income parents will not be able to gather information about their options to select appropriate schools for their children. The authors show that visual cues can indicate levels of academic performance and school safety—the two dimensions of schools that concern parents—and may allow parents to make good choices among schools.

The Progrowth Entrepreneur in Local Government

In this research note, the authors explore progrowth entrepreneurs in suburban governments. They first identify the role of progrowth entrepreneurs in proposing policies favorable to the business community and in creating the coalitions necessary to enact probusiness policies in local governments. They then examine the conditions that increase the likelihood of finding a progrowth entrepreneur in suburban communities. Although some fiscal and demographic factors affect the emergence of progrowth entrepreneurs, they find that political structures that increase the benefits of entrepreneurship and that reduce its costs are more important.

Checks, Balances, and Thresholds: State Regulatory Re-enforcement and Federal Preemption

In the last two decades, many cases of actual or attempted federal preemption of state regulation have followed an intriguing new interactive pattern. While this pattern is not comprehensive enough to define a new theory of federalism (see Zimmerman 2004 ), it now occurs regularly enough to merit close attention and an attempted understanding of its dynamics (see Walters 2004 ). It is also an example of the kind of complicated federalism, with vertical checks, balances and thresholds, that has emerged in a 21 st century America closely divided upon whether and how to use government policy to address various social and economic problems.

Institutions, Bureaucratic Decisions, and Policy Outcomes: State Insurance Solvency Regulation

Although over the past 2 decades several scholars have documented a link between institutional arrangements and policy choices, few studies have demonstrated how different institutional arrangements give rise to different policy outcomes. Further, although some studies have related bureaucratic resources to policy decisions, almost none have illustrated that the way state agencies actually deploy regulatory resources—policy outputs—significantly influences policy outcomes. Focusing specifically on the insurance industry in the United States, in this article we illustrate the impact of state regulatory activities on the solvency of firms in the insurance industry from 1987 to 1997, and in doing so we emphasize the differences between policy outputs and policy outcomes. In the case of policy outputs, for example, we find that elected insurance commissioners, divided state government, budgetary resources, and larger insurance sectors lead to more aggressive solvency examinations of insurers. In addition to examinations, however, we discern an important role for both regulatory and political institutions in subsequent insurer insolvencies.

Implications of Public School Choice for Residential Location Decisions

A growing empirical literature demonstrates the effects of introducing public school choice on housing values. The weakening of the connection between home location and school location has implications for urban and suburban communities. In this article, we contribute to the understanding of how public school choice is related to the residential location decisions of parents. Using a nationally-representative sample, we demonstrate that where public school choice is reported to be available, the probability that parents choose a residence based on the assigned schools is 6.5 percentage points lower. Parents are actively incorporating the option to choose schools into the decision of where to live and report relatively high levels of parental satisfaction with those schools. At the same time, roughly, one out of every eight children engaged in school choice attends a school that was not their family’s first choice and report substantially lower levels of school satisfaction. This mismatch between schools and students may limit the likelihood that more families will eschew traditional residential school choice.

Denver makes a fairer choice

Denver Public Schools traditional and charter schools combined to create a single system that allowed all students to indicate their school choice preferences, replacing a system of more than 60 different selection processes. The new system also gave families a wealth of information regarding school quality. A study of the new system found it was fairer than its predecessor to students from disadvantaged backgrounds but that families nonetheless tended to chose schools closer to home regardless of their quality ranking.