The U.S. labor market is at a crossroads. Many sectors and their employers face a persistent struggle to fill positions. This challenge is driven by several interconnected factors: an aging population, lagging labor force participation, and a widening gap between the education/training system and labor market demand that leaves many workers…

This article proposes the Kingdon-Khan Model (KKM) as an extension of John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Model (MSM) of agenda setting. While the MSM is comprehensively used to explain how issues reach policymakers' agendas, it underrepresents the influence of media, public opinion, and social movements on agenda setting. To address this limitation,…

This paper reconsiders long-standing debates in Canada about the relationship between language, race, and culture. Federal policies focused on official bilingualism (1969) and multiculturalism (1971) animated local movements of parents, students, and other community members demanding greater linguistic and racial inclusion in schools. This paper…

In the United States, most mothers work during pregnancy. Yet, until the passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act in 2022, pregnant employees did not have a right to reasonable accommodations to work under safe conditions. This law is expected to increase employment among pregnant women, making it critical to understand the effects of work…

Connecting policymakers with data and research to inform public policy has never been easy. In an era of heightened partisanship, the challenges of elevating research to inform public policy are even more daunting. Drawing on their roles and experiences, the authors offer recommendations for faculty and academic researchers who seek to better…

This article presents an approach for teaching policy capacity to civil servants based on a workshop that took place in 2018 under the auspices of the Government of Prince Edward Island's Policy Capacity Learning Series. It argues that workshops which introduce civil servants to the concept of policy capacity can enhance skills-based training and…

For many years Denmark has had a reputation for being laissez-faire in language matters. There is no explicit language legislation, and the Danish Language Council has mainly descriptive functions. However, there is a powerful standard language ideology, and in other societal domains such as education or immigration, language is heavily regulated.…

Teach for Australia was announced by the Australian Government in 2008, at a corporate dinner sponsored by Swiss multinational investment bank UBS, hosting New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Conceptualising Teach for Australia as a polycentric policy network anchored in venture philanthropy, this paper examines how networks mobilise major…

The election of Donald Trump was an astounding moment in the history of the United States. As academics across disciplines and social work as a profession struggled to understand the election and its effects, several syllabi were crowd sourced to explain the phenomenon known as Trumpism. This article describes a social work social policy course…

This article summarises a storytelling process used to obtain data from five anonymised teachers as part of a doctoral thesis. The small story and story completion approach was used to gain insight into how teachers reconciled refugee/asylum seeker policies with inclusive practice. The process proved a useful way of enabling teachers to consider a…

This document provides an overview of historic policy reforms that have improved student success and close racial equity gaps in completion at California Community Colleges.

A unique partnership between art therapists and legislative advocates afforded an opportunity to combine their skills for micro-level (psychosocial) and macro-level (social policy) change in pursuit of gun control reform. In a two-day retreat for gun violence survivors rooted in an arts-based narrative engagement, the art therapists aided the…

The rich body of literature that has sought to shed light on how global trends shape public sector institutions at the local level frequently claims that globalization is significantly transforming national institutions. Against that backdrop, the term "governance" is actually a multifaceted concept representing an ongoing process…

The federal government is the largest source of academic research and development (R&D) funding in the United States, providing funds through more than two dozen federal agencies. U.S. colleges and universities, often referred to as institutions of higher education (IHEs), play a role in the U.S. R&D ecosystem and in supporting American…

The intersection of arts and public policy is three-dimensional. A multitude of direct subsidy, regulatory, and support programs are advocated and managed as "arts policy," but a wide variety of non-arts-targeted realms such as tax law, public education, public health, and urban development and housing programs importantly influence…