A Computational Analysis of Universal ESA Policy Deliberations in State Legislative Hearings, 2019–2025

• In Event: Politics, Governance, and Policymaking in Education

Abstract

Introduction/Background. The rapid expansion of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) represents one of the most significant shifts in education policy in decades. Yet little is known about how discourse surrounding these programs has evolved in the legislative venues where policy is actually made. This study addresses that gap by applying computational text analysis to state legislative committee hearing transcripts, a data source capturing authentic deliberation among policymakers, expert witnesses, and public stakeholders. We ask: (1) How did policymakers and stakeholders frame private school choice during universal ESA deliberations? (2) How did these frames compare to deliberations across all other education policy topics? (3) Has frame prevalence changed over time, especially pre- to post-COVID?

Data. We analyzed over 500 House and Senate Education Committee meetings held between 2019 and 2025 in Texas, Utah, and Arizona - states with distinct ESA policy trajectories. Texas serves as a natural experiment, having failed to pass universal ESA legislation in 2023 before successfully enacting the Texas Education Freedom Accounts in 2025. Arizona expanded its Empowerment ESA to universal eligibility in 2022, while Utah enacted the Utah Fits All ESA in 2023. Together, these cases enable cross-state comparison and longitudinal analysis before and after major legislative outcomes.

Research Design and Methods. Audio and video recordings from state legislative archives were transcribed and diarized into speaker segments of approximately 150–250 words, yielding over 45,000 segments. We applied a dictionary-based frame detection approach to identify the prevalence and co-occurrence of eight theoretically grounded frames: market competition; economic benefits; parental rights; individual choice; school quality; system reform; equity and opportunity; and evidence-based. Frame detection was applied to 3,659 segments identified as ESA-relevant via lexical density scoring, as well as to the broader corpus. Longitudinal co-occurrence patterns were examined using Jaccard similarity indices and non-metric multidimensional scaling.

Results/Findings. Preliminary findings reveal a striking shift in ESA discourse over the study period. Parental rights emerged as the dominant anchor frame across all topics and remained consistently elevated across states. Parental rights and market competition framing rose sharply after 2022, while school quality framing declined concurrently. Economic benefit framing surged in Texas between 2023 and 2025, coinciding with the shift from legislative failure to passage. Evidence-based and equity and opportunity frames remained consistently peripheral across states and time periods. Frame co-occurrence analysis indicated that ESA proponents increasingly deployed an interlocking rhetorical coalition, stitching together market competition, individual choice, parental rights, and economic benefit frames, while oppositional frames remained fragmented.

Conclusion/Implications. These findings offer insight into how policy discourse is constructed and consolidated in conservative state legislatures, suggesting that passage of universal ESA programs depends less on evidence-based persuasion than on the strategic bundling of market-oriented and rights-based frames. The study introduces a scalable framework for analyzing legislative deliberation and contributes to growing scholarship on computational approaches to education policy research.

Authors

• Joseph J Ferrare, University of Washington Bothell
  Presenting Author

• Huriya Jabbar, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Emily Hodge, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author