Despite a long history of local control of schools, educational issues have become increasingly contested at higher levels of government as battles are fought in state and federal venues and along partisan lines. In light of this change as well as recent battles over school responses to COVID-19 and schools' roles in combating systemic racism, we…

For decades, policymakers in the U.S. have leveraged accountability policy as a governing tool to lift school performance and close the achievement gap. Accountability become so widespread that it arguably became a "policy paradigm" with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002. Yet after just 13 years of…

The improvement of low-performing school systems is one potential strategy for mitigating educational inequality. Some evidence suggests districtwide reform may be more effective than school-level change, but limited research examines district-level turnaround. There is also little scholarship examining the effects of turnaround reforms on…

This study critically examines gender equality planning (GEP), which has been obligatory in all Finnish comprehensive schools since 2015. GEP has been welcomed as a promising method of systemizing perspectives on gender in Finnish basic education. A regionally representative, discretional sample of gender equality plans (N = 140) was analysed…

Conflict over the curriculum is nothing new in American public education, which has never been insulated from the culture wars. In the past few years, conflict over the teaching of race has torn through history and social studies classrooms, inciting the most serious fight over America's past since the last "history war" in the 1990s. At…

Conflicts over education and education policy continue, and now new, diversified actors push for change while technologies expand the terrain where conflicts unfold. Conflict theories would seem best suited to address these conflicts. However, despite conflict theories' substantive contributions, they are infrequently used in the US context and…

The Trump administration may push for a shift away from the current formula-driven federal K-12 education funding toward more flexible block grants -- part of a broader effort to significantly scale back the U.S. Department of Education and direct more education policy decision-making to the states. If Congress authorizes this new flexibility,…

This study analyzed the vision, operations, and governance structure of state legislature on the College and Career Readiness (CCR) education policy to identify the decision-making process and opportunities and gaps for an equitable K-12 education pathway that challenges a more inclusive implementation of readiness at the state level. I endeavored…

Drawing on longitudinal data of state K--12 education policymaker demographics, we examine education policymaking body diversity over time, and across states and institutional structures. Though dominated by white businessmen, females and professional educators increased their presence at the education policymaking table. There was little movement…

A long history of scholarship on teacher professionalism documents how different narratives about teaching animate education policy and practice. We bridge the Advocacy Coalition Framework with institutional logics to examine how beliefs about teaching unite and divide a state-level coalition pursuing teacher licensure policy reform and manifest…

Voter turnout for school board elections is historically low, with tiny percentages deciding who governs schools. Columnist Jonathan E. Collins proposes a new federal holiday, School Board Election Day, to increase voter turnout and public involvement and interest in public schools. School board elections would be held on the same day nationally,…

In many parts of the country, enrollment in traditional public schools has fallen to its lowest point in decades. However, states, cities, and school districts have been slow to respond to the reality of empty desks. This report examines trends in school enrollment, focusing on several of America's most populous cities, as well as the budgetary…

Modernism and postmodernism are two opposed approaches that are directly related to how each human mind sees and perceives the world and how to make it better. In the Greek educational system, in both primary and secondary education, an effort is made to general restructure the curriculum by promoting the use of new teaching methods in the…

White evangelical churches and organizations play a significant role in mobilizing congregants as participants in the white Christian nationalist movement. This fusion of faith and politics has made white evangelicals "ambassadors" of white Christian nationalism (Miller, 2022). This paper interrogates the history, theology, and politics…

The potential for cross-racial coalitions between minoritized communities in educational advocacy and policymaking is enhanced as communities become increasingly diverse. In this qualitative case study, we use interviews and archival data to explore coalition politics between Black and Latinx community leaders in a large, metropolitan school…