Doing Evidence: A Network Analysis of School Voucher Policies in the United States

• In Event: School Discipline and School Choice: Racial Inequities Within Neoliberal Policy Contexts

Abstract

The proposed paper employs tools from network ethnography to explore the context of influence in the promotion of voucher school policies in the US. Our task here is to map this policy field through a network analysis focused on the American Federation for Children (AFC) as its central node in order to identify and establish connections between and among network actors promoting voucher school policies in the US. Findings lend credence to Ball’s (2009) conceptualization of education policy fields as heterarchical, “an organisational form somewhere between hierarchy and network which draws upon diverse horizontal and vertical links that… operates at and across ‘levels’ (local, sub-national, national and international)” (p. 689).

Authors

• Scott Ellison, University of Northern Iowa

• Ariel M. Aloe, University of Iowa