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Frontline Policymaking: The Politics of K-12 Education During COVID-19
Fried, Ethan Ilan
Fried, Ethan Ilan
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2024-05
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Political Science
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10189
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This dissertation includes three studies that investigate the factors that shaped emergency educational policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon scholarship on federalism, bureaucratic behavior, and partisanship, these studies expand our knowledge on the impact that local and state politics can have upon street-level bureaucrats’ choice of policy initiatives, capacity to implement that policy, and how politics can influence the decision to depart from the bureaucracy entirely.The first study considers non-political factors’ association with the partisan reflex to either open schools virtually (for Democrats) or open in-person only (for Republicans). The key finding from this investigation is that factors like special education populations countervail the Republican likelihood of selecting in-person only instruction. The second study explores the ways in which local political competition drives feelings of professional burnout for K-12 educators and their decision to stay in the profession. Results from this study support the theory that more competitive local politics increase feelings of professional burnout, while those feelings of burnout, in turn, are associated with the decision to exit the profession unexpectedly. The final study in the project examined the association between local and state partisanship and the volume of risk-mitigating safety policies, including mask mandates, asymptomatic testing, and HVAC improvements. Results from this study suggest that although schools in liberal counties saw increased volume of COVID-19 mitigating policies, this relationship increased substantially for liberal counties housed in conservatively-controlled states (states with Republican governors).
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