Centralization and Subnational Capacity: The Struggle to Make Federalism Work Equitably in Public Education

Abstract

Vast disparities between and within American states’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have evoked renewed attention to whether greater centralization might enhance investments in subnational capacity and remedy subnational inequalities or instead erode subnational organizational capacity. Developments in American public education (1997–2015) offer perspective on this puzzle, which we examine by applying interrupted time series analysis to a novel dataset to assess the implications of centralization on subnational investments in administrative and technical capacity, two dimensions of organizational capacity. We find simultaneous subnational erosion in administrative capacity and growth in technical capacity following centralization, both of which appear concentrated in low-poverty areas despite centralization’s explicit antipoverty purposes. Public education reforms highlight both the challenge of dismantling subnational inequality through centralization and the need for future research on policy designs that enable centralization to yield subnational capacity that is able to remedy inequality.

The unexpected consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on maritime crime: Evidence from Indonesia and Nigeria

“…By making such a comparison, researchers can estimate the effect size of the shock. For instance, studies have utilized government stringency during COVID-19 as the external shock in the ITS analysis (ITSA) design and examined its effect on social and policy issues like beer consumption in Australia (Vandenberg et al, 2021), the consumer spending behavior in Turkey (Kantur & Özcan, 2021), centralization and public education in the United States (Moffitt et al, 2021), or the motor vehicle traffic and crash pattern in Connecticut (Doucette et al, 2021). This method is particularly relevant for policy evaluation in the short term, narrowing the study timeframe to immediately before and after the intervention so that other unrelated shocks do not complicate the results as we extend the pre-time and post-time periods (see Abadie, 2021, 293).…”

State Education Agency Governance, Virtual Learning, and Student Privacy: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Historically, state education agencies’ purview included administration, from taxation and revenue dispersal to managing public school buildings ( Moffitt et al, 2021 ; Steffes, 2011 ). While state education agencies have formal authority over schools, SEA’s delegated operational decisions to local education agencies ( Timar, 1997 ).…”

“…Increased responsibilities for SEAs did not coincide with expanded financial support to build state capacity ( Sunderman & Orfield, 2006 ), and state education departments lacked the organizational and financial resources to meet federal mandates. As a result, SEAs continued to prioritize compliance over the development of administrative expertise necessary to centralize policy options for districts ( Moffitt et al, 2021 ). After the recession, funding issues constrained state education agencies operating budgets and limited staffing making it difficult to build capacity ( Kober & Rentner, 2011 ).…”

Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities

“…Yet, the tasks of policy formulation and implementation are often located at different levels and places of government. As shown in the literature on US federalism, central governments tend to impose additional financial and administrative burdens on subnational governments via unfunded mandates (Moffitt et al 2021). There is hence a considerable potential that the costs and benefits of new policies are decoupled.…”