Sarah Reckhow

Institution: Michigan State University

Email: reckhow@msu.edu

Website: https://www.sarahreckhow.com/

Sarah Reckhow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching interests include urban politics, education policy, and nonprofits and philanthropy. In 2018-19, she was awarded a fellowship with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Her newest book, written with Jeffrey Henig and Rebecca Jacobsen, is Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics. Her first book, Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, examines the role of major foundations, such as the Gates Foundation, in urban school reform. Reckhow was awarded a research grant from the W.T. Grant Foundation (with Megan Tompkins-Stange) to study the use of research evidence in the development of teacher quality policy debates. She has recently published articles in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Review, and Policy Studies Journal. Reckhow is affiliated with the Global Urban Studies Program and the Education Policy Center at Michigan State. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Previously, Reckhow taught history and government at Frederick Douglass High School in the Baltimore City Public Schools.

EdWorkingPapers

All States Close but Red Districts Reopen: The Politics of In-Person Schooling during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Matt Grossmann, Sarah Reckhow, Katharine Strunk, Meg Turner. 02/2021

The COVID-19 pandemic created enormous challenges for public education. We assess the role of political factors and public health in state and local education decisions, especially the continuation of learning during COVID-19. Using an original dataset of state education policies since the start of the pandemic, we find that governors took the lead on ordering school closures in Spring 2020 but left decisions to districts in the Fall, regardless of partisanship. Partisanship played a much stronger role in local decisions than state decisions. We analyze local district reopening plans and public opinion on reopening in the politically competitive state of Michigan. Partisanship was much more associated with district reopening plans than COVID-19 rates. Republicans in the Michigan public were also far more favorable than were Democrats toward in-person learning. States' decisions to leave reopening plans to their districts opened the way for students’ experiences to be shaped by their area's partisanship.

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Shifting Alliances in State Political Parties: The Case of Education Interest Groups

Leslie K. Finger, Sarah Reckhow. 01/2020

Political parties in the U.S. are composed of networks of interest groups, according to the extended party network theory. Scholars have focused on national extended party networks. We use the case of education interest groups to explore how policy environments shape party networks on the state level. Using 145,000 campaign contributions from 2000 to 2017, we show that the alignment of education interest groups has changed over time. In 2000, teachers unions were the dominant group and aligned with Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans lacked support from any education group. This pattern was relatively consistent across states. Over time, coalitions diverged, with some state networks polarizing, meaning unions increasingly aligned with Democrats and reform groups with Republicans, while others did not experience such polarization. We find that labor law restrictions and private school choice programs were related to these trends, suggesting that state-level policies shape the contours of state party networks.

Download 01/20201.37 MB