States have increasingly sought to house pre-K and child care in the same agency--often including the Head Start collaboration office and other early childhood services. This article discusses three major approaches: (1) Creating a new agency focused on early childhood; (2) Consolidating functions in a human services agency; and (3) Consolidating…

Research shows that access to school health services improves health and academic outcomes, particularly for students with chronic health issues. Finding sustainable funding has been an ongoing struggle. This policy brief presents opportunities to expand access to--and resources for--school health services using available Medicaid funds. In…

For more than 30 years, Medicaid has played a key role in paying for school health services. As the source of health insurance for 40 percent of children across the country, Medicaid helps ensure low-income children receive healthcare they need to be healthy and ready to learn. Today, new opportunities exist to enhance the role that Medicaid plays…

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, tuition increased more than 34 percent between 2008 and 2015. State spending on higher education remains well below pre-recession levels. As a result, millions of low-income students, particularly students of color, are struggling to afford postsecondary education. Forty years ago, the…

For-profit colleges do not always recruit aggressively; nor do they always shortchange students. But the problem of colleges systematically overpromising and underdelivering, when it does happen, has largely been a for-profit phenomenon. The abuses have been the most widespread and most damaging when they have been fueled by government grants and…

Well before President Barack Obama vaulted early childhood learning to the top of the education agenda in his recent State of the Union address, states were taking steps to bolster their own preschool programs. More than a dozen states--including some, such as Hawaii and Mississippi, that have had no state-financed preschool programs in the…

Even though 34 states and the District of Columbia have No Child Left Behind Act waivers in hand, many of them are still negotiating with the U.S. Department of Education over their teacher evaluation systems--a crucial component if they want to keep their newfound flexibility. More than six months after waiver recipients turned in their…

Education policy-making in Australia remains one of the most complex of government's responsibilities, affecting a broad spectrum of social and political advancements of national and international importance. The advancement of education policy has been accepted as a key factor in achieving the labour productivity and innovation capacity that are…

Many policies and initiatives have been proposed or implemented to address the unique needs of military families who face special challenges while supporting the service of their military member(s). Some of those policies and initiatives have sought to focus on military-connected children (MCCs) and the particular academic challenges they face.…

While the federal government spends billions of dollars every year on federal education programs, federal policymakers and education advocates often lament that these programs do not achieve their intended results--specifically, increasing student academic achievement. To address this problem, policymakers and advocates typically debate the merits…

In the United States, as public demands for quality teachers have escalated, there has been a corresponding increase in national policy efforts to tie the standards of student success to teacher preparation, licensing, and evaluation. This conceptual paper examines how national authorities used specific policy tools to usurp the state's…

Before awarding waivers from core tenets of the No Child Left Behind Act to 11 states, the U.S. Department of Education ordered changes to address a significant weakness in most states' proposals: how they would hold schools accountable for groups of students deemed academically at risk, particularly those in special education or learning English.…

Increasing federal intervention and the resulting burden of complying with federal programs, rules, and regulations has caused a significant growth in state bureaucracy, much of which has a parasitic relationship with federal education programs, straining the time and resources of local schools. Instead of responding first to students, parents,…

For more than 5-years, the U.S. Department of Education has been developing and implementing a new data system, ED"Facts", designed to contain all the educational data it collects from states. This article provides a summary of the development of the new federal system and describes some of the benefits and challenges it poses for…

President Obama's Educate to Innovate initiative has provided billions in additional federal funding for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs across the country. The Administration's recognition of the importance of STEM education-- for global competitiveness as well as for national security--is good and…