Today's education-to-career ecosystem is too complex to navigate and lacks a supportive policy infrastructure for exposing students to the world of work and empowering them to make informed choices about their education and career options and advance along their desired pathways. This report highlights the need for states to build more effective…

Over the past three decades, tax-credit scholarship (TCS) policies have helped hundreds of thousands of American families provide their children with the learning environment that meets their individual needs. Until recently, TCS policies were the most-used form of private school choice. Now available in 21 states, more than 330,000 students…

The Trump administration's push to scale back the federal role in education could mean more autonomy for states. But this increased decision-making power will also make state K-12 accountability more important than ever. States must ensure education funding is used effectively, especially for those students furthest from opportunity. While some…

Community college to university transfer (i.e., vertical transfer) is an important potential path to a bachelor's degree. However, community colleges may be particularly challenging for students to navigate. In this brief we argue that multiple transfer policies, combined with the complexity of community colleges, create a set of choices that are…

Over the past four years, Florida has seen tremendous growth in the amount of public funds being spent on private education. This report finds that in 2022-23, an estimated $1.3 billion in funding will be redirected from public school districts to private education, representing 10% of state K-12 education funds allocated through the Florida…

Research has demonstrated the wide-ranging and positive benefits from high-quality publicly-funded prekindergarten education. Yet, access for families with young children remains uneven, with significant gaps across geography, income, race, and ethnicity. Over the last few decades, many states have worked to broaden access to prekindergarten…

As states legalize medical cannabis, school nurses face increased parent questions about administration at school. Although school nurses frequently collaborate on the development and implementation of medication administration policies, their perceptions of barriers to school-based medical cannabis administration are not well-documented. To…

Arising from a research-based, comprehensive school transformation strategy, community schools organize in- and out-of-school resources and supports such as mental health services, meals, health care, tutoring, internships, and other learning and career opportunities to fit specific community needs. Through this strategy, students, families,…

In 2021, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 233. The bill has three provisions: 1) it mandates an "intellectual viewpoint diversity" survey that asks students, faculty, and other employees at Florida's public colleges and universities to report on their levels of comfort to express their ideological and political opinions; 2) it…

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is now more than twenty years beyond its inception when it was built on the concept that digital materials make learning content easy to reuse and share. This report discusses current legislative trends in OER and offers recommended OER practices for states.

Because states typically fund districts based on student counts, districts reporting shrinking enrollment worry about shrinking dollars as well. The seemingly obvious quick fix is for states to hold districts financially harmless for some or all of their enrollment loss. But states have many factors to weigh when deciding whether or how to go down…

Substantial evidence supports comprehensive sex education programs as effective means of promoting adolescent sexual health, but evidence on the effect of state-level sex education policy is inconclusive. Multiple states in the U.S. afford local authority in school policy, and existing literature calls for investigation of the impact of local…

COVID-19 upended schooling across the United States, but with what consequences for the state-level institutions that drive most education policy? This paper reports findings on two related research questions. First, what were the most important ways state government education policymakers changed schools and schooling from the moment they began…

This study assessed the impact of COVID-19 on secondary teachers' assessment, grading, and reporting practices in south Florida. The study included a review of the literature on the history of traditional versus criterion-based grading and reporting; accountability and equity in grading prior to COVID-19; challenges in implementing alternative…

Florida Senate Bill 1720 drastically changed developmental education, beginning in fall 2014. This paper considers affected faculty members' perceptions and experiences with the passage and implementation of reform, according to focus group data provided by 294 participants at 21 Florida College System institutions between 2014 and 2019. We found…