As the COVID-19 crisis disrupted schooling, recovery efforts in California included the adoption of Senate Bill (SB) 98, which mandated local educational agencies to complete Learning Continuity and Attendance Plans (LCPs). These plans act as critical snapshots of sensemaking and local policy implementation during crisis; however, their details…

Policies restricting bilingual education have yielded to policy frameworks touting its benefits. This shift corresponds with evolving lines of debate, focusing now on "how" bilingual education can best support racialized bilingual learners. One element of this new debate is the perspective on language underlying curriculum in bilingual…

Legislative professionalism is central to the politico-institutional context of postsecondary policy adoption in state governments. The core argument in existing research is that as legislative professionalism increases, structural capacity for decision-making increases. Evidence for this argument is mixed, exclusively quantitative, and assumes a…

This article provides an overview of recent changes to state-level dyslexia legislation. It begins by applying a variant of Kingdon's multiple streams approach to explain how the dyslexia education "policy window" came to be opened. The article then describes the most likely effects and side effects of the new laws. Likely short-term…

This policy study traces the history of school finance in Colorado over four and a half decades and describes how the available levers of direct democracy in the state have led to a seemingly insurmountable political logjam that is restricting budgets for all essential government services. Precollegiate education is particularly affected as…

In 2009, a seldom-used policy lever emerged in the form of a competitive grant program, Race to the Top (RTTT), and sparked a flurry of state-led initiatives as states vied for federal dollars. The current study examines the policymaking context that surrounded these events and propelled Tennessee to the top of the race among the states. Through…

This article examines how state-level policy discourse articulates a category of knowledge about immigrants in South Carolina that governs the everyday experiences of undocumented immigrants. In the analysis of proposed and enacted immigration legislation from 2005 to the present, we use a Foucauldian-inspired critical discourse analysis to better…

Although individual components of reform initiatives may appear promising, little thought is given to possible inconsistencies resulting from implementing multiple reform components simultaneously. This article describes some unintended consequences arising from inconsistencies between and within components of Kentucky's systemic education reform.…

Examines the legislator's role as education policy expert in the legislative policymaking process. In a study of Louisiana state legislators, analysis of variance was used to determine expert legislators' degree of influence in formulating educational policy, given differences in policy types, information sources, and legislators' work roles.…