Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper introduces a new measure of state centralization and examines how centralization shapes the design and implementation of state-level education reforms. Recently, the federal government, coalitions of states, and non-governmental organizations have incentivized state policymakers to adopt numerous education policy reforms. Examples include the Common Core State Standards and Obama administration initiatives such as Race to the Top and ESEA Flexibility waivers. In the new era of state flexibility under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), state education leaders will almost certainly remain a target audience for policymakers and reformers hoping to improve K-12 education. It is imperative to understand how states respond to these calls for reform.

Conventional wisdom suggests that centralization of the state education governance structure is an important factor in explaining interstate variation in education policy design and implementation (Cohen and Spillane 1992; Finn and Petrilli 2013; Manna 2013). The logic is straightforward: compared to centralized systems, decentralized systems may involve multiple policymakers with conflicting policy goals. Consequently, the decision-making process in decentralized systems can be less efficient and produce less coherent policy designs. When the federal government, a coalition of states, or a non-governmental actor suggests or incentivizes a new education reform, a reasonable assumption is that states with a more centralized education governance structure are more likely to respond with coherent policy proposals and take the lead in implementing changes.

However, we lack a single measure of centralization that accounts for the multiple components of each state’s education governance structure, preventing us from examining this hypothesis. To address this gap, this paper introduces a measure of centralization that reflects the governor’s power to select the state board of education members and the chief state school officer, who are central to state-level education policymaking. Building on previous work (Manna 2013), this measure accounts for the institutional constraints that shape the governor’s control over filling these positions, reflecting the governor’s appointment authority, the legislature’s confirmation authority, and where relevant, whether the governor’s party controls the legislature, among other features. More centralized states grant the governor unconstrained appointment authority, while less centralized states limit appointment authority or elect these positions. To account for the vertical dispersion of authority, I weight this measure by the logged number of districts in a state.

Based on the executive authority literature (Moe 1985; Howell 2015), I expect that states with more centralized governance structures are more likely to 1) design coherent policy reforms and 2) implement policy changes. I measure these outcomes using Race to the Top application scores and National Council on Teacher Quality grades, respectively. I then test these hypotheses using my new measure of centralization. Consistent with expectations, the results suggest that more centralized states are more likely to design strong policy proposals and implement proposed reforms. This work indicates that centralization is an important component of the state education policy-making environment. Moving forward, this new measure of centralization can help us understand how states will respond to opportunities for reform in the new era under ESSA.