Regulating School Reforms: An Analysis of the Impact of Religious Interests on State Education Policies

Abstract

This project analyzes the role of religious populations on the restrictiveness of state education policies, and looks into the impact of evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) on private school choice, public school choice, and home schools It measures the size of the state's religious population using both congregational measurements and population rate measurements provided by the Glenmary Research Center, and tests hypotheses with ordinal logistic regression. Ultimately, this research finds that the size of a state's religious populations is an important predictor of policy restrictiveness. Private school choice policies are best predicted by Catholic adherents and LDS adherents; Charter school policy restrictiveness is best predicted by evangelical adherents and LDS adherents; and home school policy restrictiveness is best predicted by evangelical adherents, with LDS adherents providing some predictive power for home school policies.