An Education Politics of Place? Exploring Variation in Public Opinion Across U.S. States and School Districts
In a federal system like the United States, assessing the democratic responsiveness of education policy requires evidence on public opinion in specific states and school districts. Despite recent progress in gathering data on the education policy preferences of the American public as a whole, we have little evidence on how these preferences vary geographically. In this paper, we use data from multiple waves of the annual Education Next Survey and the method of multi-level regression and poststratification to generate the first comparable measures of opinion on several contested issues in education policy across the 50 states and largest 50 school districts. We use these estimates to provide preliminary analysis of the correspondence between public preferences and education policies across geography.

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