This dissertation examines how a variety of demographic factors and policy instruments interact and affect the extent to which education remains inclusive and accessible to the needs of diverse students and families. The dissertation does so in a three-essay format, with each essay respectively aimed at three different stages of education (i.e., Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), Kindergarten, and K-12 schools) within the U.S. context. The first essay examines regulations in the context of child care market. Regulations are often justified as a mechanism to enhance quality of child care, but unintended labor market consequences could instead reduce the quantity and quality of services provided. Using a continuous and binary treatment difference-in-differences strategy that exploits unprecedented variation in child care regulations during the period surrounding Covid-19, this study finds that regulations reduced the demand for child care labor and motivated providers to substitute away from high-skilled labor. The second essay examines Arizona’s full-day kindergarten expansion between 2004-2010. This expansion implicitly acted as a subsidy for child care, by reducing the required number of after-school care hours. Using a difference-in-differences framework, this study finds that the availability of full-day kindergarten increased employment among some subgroups of mothers with age-eligible children. Finally, the third essay is set in the context of immigration and K-12 demographics. The theory of native flight suggests that U.S. born subpopulations move away from neighborhoods which receive higher numbers of immigrants. Merging school level data with the U.S. census data over the years 2005-2019, I use an instrumental variable approach to find that U.S. born students show heterogeneous patterns of flight in response to immigration. The dissertation showcases the relevance of certain policy variations and demographic characteristics in the context of affordability, diversity, and access in education.

Network analysis is a key conceptual orientation and analytical tool in the social sciences that emphasizes the embeddedness of individual behavior within a larger web of social relations. The network approach is used to better understand the cause and consequence of social interactions which cannot be treated as independent. The relational nature of network data and models, however, amplify the methodological concerns associated with inaccurate or missing data. This dissertation addresses such concerns via three projects. As a motivating substantive example, Project 1 examines factors associated with the selection of interaction partners by students at a large urban high school implementing a reform which, like many organizational improvement initiatives, is associated with a theory of change that posits changes to the structuring of social interactions as a central causal pathway to improved outcomes. A distinctive aspect of the data used in Project 1 is that it was a complete egocentric network census – in addition to being asked about their own relationships, students were asked about the relationships between alters that they nominated in the self-report. This enables two unique examinations of methodological challenges in network survey data collection: Project 2 examines the factors related to how well survey respondents assess the strength of social connections between others, finding that "informant" competence corresponds positively with their social proximity to target dyad as well as their centrality in the network. Project 3 explores using such third-party reports to augment network imputation methods, and finds that incorporating third-party reports into model-based methods provides a significant boost in imputation accuracy. Together these findings provide important implications for collecting and extrapolating data in research contexts where a complete social network census is highly desirable but infeasible.

Cross-sector interactions are regularly seen in healthcare, education, defense, public safety, and other social service contexts where the public interest and the private individual intersect. While interest in cross-sector relationships is neither new nor novel, the organizational dynamics and contexts continue to change and challenge our understanding of what is meant by partnership, alliance, collaboration, or cooperation between independent organizations from different sectors. One type of cooperative arrangement between nonprofits and government are affiliated foundations, which are part of the landscape of emerging organizational hybrids and expanding government-nonprofit relationships. Affiliated foundations are nonprofits designed to support a specific entity by generating charitable resources. This dissertation looks at one specific context for affiliated foundation/ "parent" relationships through a multi-case study of local educations in Florida. Specifically, this research examines how local education foundations carry out a partnering relationship with the school district. Through a combination of three instrumental case studies of local education foundations, and fifteen other purposely selected foundations, this dissertation presents the results of a cross-case analysis of the partnership between local education foundations and school districts. Partnership is conceptualized across four dimensions: 1) attention, 2) successive engagement, 3) resource infusion, and 4) positional identity. This research reveals that through the four dimensions of partnership, we can account for the variation across embedded, interdependent, or independent local education foundations in relation to the school district, or their "parent" organization. As a result, local education foundations reflect different relationships with school districts, which ultimately impacts their ability to carry out their work as charitable organizations, derived from the community in which they operate, and designed to generate resources and support for public education. By looking at this specific context, we can consider the complexities of an affiliated relationship between two structurally separate but linked organizations assumed to act as partners, but working to achieve a partnership. Where cooperation, collaboration, and innovation are intended outcomes of affiliated foundation/government relationships, this research considers the role of affiliated foundations among more traditional cross-sector relationships where services and contracts tend to dominate.