Expanding the Capacity for Data Use in Education Policy: Three Papers on the Legislative Origins, Intergovernmental Networks, and Bureaucratic Infrastructure that Contributed to the Rise of State Longitudinal Data Systems

Abstract

Forty states, including the District of Columbia, have established state longitudinal data systems (SLDS). The data included, intended functions, and methods for establishing SLDS vary from state to state. Further, forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have received one or more federal grant to support SLDS development. The adoption of SLDS constitutes a policy innovation in a state. The rise of SLDS provided a test case for studying the relationship between policy alternatives, complex bureaucratic structures, and federal incentives and a state'sability to innovate. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were used to examine the legislative origins, intergovernmental networks, and bureaucratic infrastructure associated with establishing SLDS. Policy streams theory and network governance theory provided a conceptual framework to extract and interpret text from legislation, journals, state laws, federal grants, and other documents. Internal determinants and vertical influence theories guided the selection of predictors of interest and control variables to fit a panel data set with proportional hazard and subdistribution hazard estimation models. The results support the assertion that policy adoption requires both the political community and the policy community to coalesce around a policy alternative for a problem to reach the decision agenda. It also confirms the role of the policy feedback loop in escalating a problem to the decision agenda. The findings highlight the importance of policy tools and the need to engineer mechanisms into those tools to elicit cooperation when multiple state agencies are required to participate in a policy innovation. Important findings include 1) the positive relationship of bureaucratic infrastructure to a state'sability to innovate and 2) that federal incentives may be effective in advancing federal policy preferences when policy authority is a power that is otherwise reserved to the states. The findings from this study have direct implications for federal grant policy as well as for state lawmakers when multiple state agencies are required for policy innovation.