Mapping the Politics of US State Education Policy

• In Event: How Policy Shapes the Development of LGBTQ Youth and Young Adults

Abstract

The education policy contexts in states across the United States are a critical consideration for the everyday lives and well-being of our nation’s children, youth, educators, and administrators. This context is intricately shaped by numerous sociopolitical factors, including the state’s positioning within the United States’ two-party system. Expansive policies require identity-affirming practices related to race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality (e.g., a school requiring the use of a student’s preferred pronouns), whereas restrictive policies restrict these practices (e.g., bans against instruction that aligns with critical race theory). Previous literature tends to examine specific policy adoption, whereas our study explores policy adoption across multiple domains and visually maps their geographic clustering, specifically asking:

1. Does state partisan lean predict the state’s proportion of expansive education policies?

2. Leveraging GIS mapping, how do states’ partisan lean and their proportion of expansive minus restrictive education policies geographically cluster around the United States?

To answer these research questions, we coupled data from our systematic education policy review with a partisan-lean metric (FiveThirtyEight, 2022) and coordinates (longitude and latitude). The educational policies were grouped into one of the following 20 categories: curriculum and instruction, student enrollment, professional development and training, interscholastic sports/extracurricular activities, facilities, bullying and harassment, discrimination, parental rights, educator recruitment and retention, discipline, related services, student dress code/code of conduct, school resource officers, educational programs and resources, educator preparation/evaluations, student pronouns, mental and behavioral health support, student information/data collection, student healthcare, and funding. Graduate students coded educational policies from a systematic search with the categories listed above and whether they were restrictive or expansive based on race/ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality.

We found no statistically significant correlation between partisan lean and our policy-context metric. We did not identify any visual trends in the GIS map. This research directly aligns with APPAM’s 2026 theme, Fifty States, Fifty Systems: State Policy Variations and Impacts, because we innovatively captured policy contexts across the fifty states. Within a highly decentralized education system, state policy environments produce meaningful variation in what situates student and educator experiences. For policymakers, this underscores the need to account for cross-state differences when designing federal standards, allocating resources, and evaluating educational outcomes. Greater alignment between policy context and federal supports may help reduce fragmentation across state systems and facilitate more equitable student transitions into postsecondary education and the workforce. This work advances advocacy by revealing how variable geographic disparities are, offering critical evidence to guide more targeted and equitable policy responses.

Author

• Lauren M Strickland, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author