Race, Equality, and Community in Local Education: How Complex Beliefs and Values Shape Educational Attitudes, Votes, and School Policy

While research on education public opinion identifies a high level of support for education, beyond self-interest, little is known about the underlying causal mechanisms and structure of this support. My dissertation seeks to move beyond the basic questions of support for education and broad education policies to consider the foundational drivers of these opinions in specific and relevant contexts. Of particular import are questions of community, race, and equality. In order to adequately consider these questions, I explore values, attitudes and vote choice in three unique and politically relevant cases. In the introductory chapter, I address the relevance and need for work in political behavior on education politics and policy. In the second chapter, I begin the empirical work by studying the role of neighborhood diversity on support for a school referendum in Houston. I find that a voter's neighborhood context influences their willingness to support building new schools. However, there is evidence of both the racial threat and social contact theories, depending on both the race of the voter and the demographics of their neighborhood. In the next study, I investigate how voters conceptualize competing dimensions of equality on a school issue in both the abstract and in a real world context. In March 2012, Evanston, Illinois residents voted on a ballot referendum that would have levied taxes earmarked for building a new school in a historically black neighborhood that had not had its own school since a 1960s citywide racial integration plan closed the nearly entirely black neighborhood school. Respondents exposed to information on either the financial costs for the new school in Evanston or the new building's negative effect on diversity in Evanston's schools dramatically shifted their prioritization of certain conceptions of equality from the abstract to this specific context. For the fourth chapter, I implemented a laboratory experiment to study how race, class, and school quality implicitly affect respondents' assessments of individual students' academic mindsets and other non-cognitive skills. I also explore respondents' willingness to then support the closing of a neighborhood school.