How Do Policy Organizations Frame Issues and Shape Identity? Exploring the Case of School Choice

• DOI: 10.1177/0095399719884735
• Author: Heath Brown
• Date: 01 August 2020
• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399719884735

Administration & Society

2020, Vol. 52(7) 1038 –1068

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DOI: 10.1177/0095399719884735

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Article

How Do Policy

Organizations Frame

Issues and Shape

Identity? Exploring the

Case of School Choice

Heath Brown1

Abstract

Conservatives reject identity politics as un-American, yet a distinct

conservative identity has formed around issues of liberty, antagonism toward

government, and local control. This identity has been connected to policies,

first helping build the coalition necessary to pass policy and later shaped

by policy implementation. Policy Feedback theory explains the mechanism

that connects conservative politics, policy, and identity. This analysis applies

a specific aspect of Policy Feedback theory to the case of school choice to

understand how organizations frame issues and shape identity. Using interest

group communications data, the findings show differences between and within

homeschooling and charter school groups.

Keywords

policy process, interest groups, conservative movement, lobbying, school

choice, education policy, Policy Feedback

In the midst of the 2016 election, Grover Norquist (2016), the influential

conservative gadfly and head of Americans for Tax Reform, argued in the

1City University of New York, New York City, USA

Corresponding Author:

Heath Brown, John Jay College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 445

West 59th Street, Room 3524 North Hall, New York City, NY 10019, USA.

Email: hbrown@jjay.cuny.edu

884735AASXXX10.1177/0095399719884735Administration & SocietyBrown

research-article2019

Brown 1039

Washington Post for a new coalition of supporters for the Republican Party.

Vapers, frackers, Uber drivers, concealed carry permit holders, homeschool-

ers, and charter schoolers were new voting blocs, not tied to Hillary Clinton,

ripe for Republican mobilization. Norquist called this the leave-us-alone

coalition and his ideal citizen as “the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-

owning guy with a concealed-carry permit.”

Conservatives have long decried identity politics as un-American (see

David Brooks’ frequent New York Times columns1), yet Norquist describes

groups of voters who are defined by identities: the gun owner, the e-cigarette

smoker, or the fracker. These identities have strong ideological dimensions,

unstated racial and ethnic ties, and are closely linked with public policy that

has loosened existing government rules and opened new choices for citizens.

Sometimes called conservative freedom policies, including eased gun owner-

ship rules and lowered environmental regulations to permit fossil fuel extrac-

tion, these policies have long been tied to the conservative movement,

suggesting there is interplay between conservative politics, conservative

policy, and conservative identity.

The 14.5 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States have

received considerable attention as an important part of the base of the

Republican Party (Steidley, 2018). It is unclear exactly how many frackers,

vapers, or Uber drivers there are, as each group has a relatively short exis-

tence. For Norquist’s other two categories, homeschoolers and charter school-

ers, we know much more about who they are, but they have not received as

much attention. Each group is tied to choice-based state public policies

passed close to three decades ago and there are millions in each group: in

2018, there were approximately 2 million homeschooled students and 3 mil-

lion charter school students, and there were many more associated parents

and former students. Furthermore, although there is considerable study of the

interest groups that shape the identity of gun owners, there is much less for

homeschooling and charter schooling. The National Rifle Association (NRA),

for example, is well known to use purposeful rhetoric to shape the identities

of gun owners and the way that gun owners are viewed in the media (Joslyn,

Haider-Markel, Baggs, & Bilbo, 2017). I ask in this paper: Do homeschool

and charter school interest groups pursue a similar strategy?

However, despite the apparent similarities to Norquist, each policy was

supported by a distinct political coalition and designed differently. Although

there was variation across states in the make-up of each political coalition,

and some degree of variation in policy goals, in general, conservatives and

libertarians designed homeschool policies to give near complete freedom to

parents to legally educate without public financial support, curricular control,

or oversight, while a centrist coalition of civil rights groups and business