Poster #121 - The Landscape and Evolvement of the School Choice Scholarship Since the 1980s—A Bibliometric Review

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

In recent decades, school choice has garnered increased attention from policymakers, scholars, practitioners, and the general public as an education policy issue. To understand how the field of school choice research is keeping up with this change, specifically how the school choice literature has evolved over time, we applied a bibliometric approach to analyzing the large body of scholarly publications on the topic of school choice in the United States. Although the term “school choice” can widely refer to the array of public and private educational options available to parents and families—beyond sending their children to their assigned neighborhood public school, our study focused on programs that expand access to alternative schooling options through the use of public funding.

Using the citation database Web of Science, we applied a series of searches and performed extensive data cleaning to construct our own bibliometric dataset of school choice literature. The search terms used included “public school choice,” “magnet school,” “charter school,” “school voucher,” “education savings account,” “tax credit scholarship,” and their possible variations. We conducted a performance analysis on the constructed bibliometric dataset, drawing findings such as the volume of school choice publications and citations—overall, by type of choice, and over time. By incorporating a temporal element into the analysis, we reviewed the bibliometric findings against the timelines when state-level school choice policies were introduced to see if there are any convergence of patterns; and we repeated this process for each specific type of choice to evaluate whether the policy-scholarship relationship is similar or different across different types of school choice programs. Our poster, for instance, will present findings on the overall volume of charter school literature over time and compare those against the timelines when state charter legislations were enacted.

Our poster will also discuss the future directions of this work, including the additional bibliometric analyses that can be conducted on the same dataset to shed light on the intellectual and thematic structure of the school choice scholarship. These analyses can help identify the prevailing streams of thought in school choice research and highlight gaps in the literature.

Authors

• Ke Wang, American Institutes for Research
  Presenting Author

• Anlan Zhang
  Non-Presenting Co-Author