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Scholars have focused on administrative burden or the costs of claiming public benefits. Learning, psychological, and compliance costs can discourage program participation and benefit redemption. Using 60 in-depth qualitative interviews with participants of the SNAP and WIC programs, we offer thick descriptions of how beneficiaries experience compliance, learning, and redemption costs—a subset of learning costs regarding how to redeem benefits—amidst COVID-19 policy changes. Although policy changes were poised to reduce compliance costs and ease conditions that create redemption costs in each program, the learning costs of policy changes prevented many program participants from experiencing the benefits of these policy transformations.

School choice is an increasingly important feature of the US educational landscape. Numerous studies examine whether a particular form of school choice promotes student achievement or whether a type of school choice discourages or encourages diversity by race, ethnicity, and ability. Studies also examine attitudes toward school choice, but these studies are typically limited to the views of parents, teachers, and administrators rather than public attitudes. We contribute to this literature by studying public opinion about magnet and charter schools in five southern school districts. Using a new and unique dataset, we examine if social background characteristics, political ideology, and attitudes toward the role of public schooling, neighborhood schools, and school diversity influence citizen opinion regarding magnets and charters. We find that more educated, higher income, and older individuals do not support charters, while conservatives and Republicans do. Whites are less likely to favor magnets than other races, while the more educated are more likely to favor them. Those who believe public schools should operate for the common good support magnets, as do those who favor diverse schools. However, those who favor neighborhood schools support both charters and magnets. We interpret our findings within the context of case studies of the respective locations and suggest that public opinion studies motivate public policies regarding educational choice.

AbstractSchool choice typically refers to opportunities to enroll youth in public and/or private educational alternatives to traditional neighborhood public schools. While these options continue to grow in the United States under the umbrella of school choice, magnet and charter schools are the most common forms of public school choice. In this article, we review the development of school choice and the differing historical and philosophical origins of magnet and charter schools. We then summarize what we know about the extent to which these public choice options exacerbate or ameliorate two forms of inequality—academic achievement and school segregation by race and class. Research suggests that magnet schools often encourage racial and class diversity, while charters contribute to racial and socioeconomic isolation. While low‐income minority students may benefit academically from attending magnet schools, it is unclear whether charter schools have any effect on achievement when comparing charter school students to their counterparts in traditional public school. We expect that continued growth of magnet schools will likely promote school diversity both within and between districts, though some types of magnets may also inadvertently promote segregation. However, expansion of the charter school sector will heighten school segregation and exacerbate racial and socioeconomic isolation.

A renewed call for replications has emerged in social science research. An important form of replication involves exploring the extent to which findings from a given study hold in other contexts. This study draws on opinion polling data to replicate key findings across time and space based on an original study in one location analyzing attitudes toward public school assignment policies. The replication finds that many of the original findings hold, though one important exception reflects the changing context. We note that the increasing availability of relatively inexpensive methods of quantitative data production facilitates replication and comment on how the temporal interval between the original study and the replication may influence the extent to which findings replicate. We argue that largely successful replications help to clarify the conditions under which findings replicate, and that sociologists are in the early stages of determining which strategies work best for replicating which findings.