Background: In the past decade, the laws governing teachers' employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. In June 2014, a California lower court declared the statutes unconstitutional…

Undocumented college students in the United States encounter a number of structural barriers to postsecondary education success, including disparate in-state resident tuition (ISRT) policies across the country. Texas, the first state to establish ISRT benefits for undocumented college students, has been a site of tension respective to this issue…

Teacher shortages in some regions, schools and content areas have caused states to consider fast-tracking teachers into the classroom through avenues that include little or no clinical preparation. Teachers who enter the profession through these pathways are less likely to be prepared, less effective and less likely to remain in the profession…

In recent decades, state policymakers across the country have turned to early literacy policies to address students' reading proficiency--particularly in third grade. Though states' policies vary widely in terms of the interventions and supports provided to educators and students, their intent is similar: to get students reading on grade level by…

The U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 decision in "Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees" (AFSCME) (referred to as "Janus" hereafter) prohibited state and local government worker unions from negotiating collective bargaining agreements with fair share fee arrangements. In this report, the authors…

After five decades advocating for school finance reform, Education Law Center (ELC) sees the urgent need to deepen understanding of how differing strategies--from litigation to research to grassroots organizing to communicating with the public--can combine to achieve successful school funding reform in the states. In "From Courthouse to…

Having access to an excellent teacher is one of the most important factors for student achievement. However, access to excellent teachers--this crucial talent resource--is in increasingly limited supply. In 2017, Arizona took bold action on teacher certification requirements in a joint effort with A for Arizona and the US Chamber Foundation. By…

School accountability systems can serve many purposes, including sharing information, measuring progress toward state and local goals, and supporting greater educational equity. Given the important role accountability systems play in states' education systems, states have taken the opportunity provided by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to…

The purpose of the qualitative exploratory case study was to examine California community college administrators' perceptions of preparation for achieving full compliance in implementing California Assembly Bill (AB) No. 705. The study involved analyzing documents, a physical artifact, and archived data from 14 community colleges in southern…

This multi-site case study uses Policy Implementation Process Examination (PIPE) and a variegated diagram to represent the evolution of interpretations in a human sense-making framework as it relates to Ohio House Bill 410, legislated in 2016. The purpose of the research is to study how implementing agents such as school district personnel respond…

There seems to be "open season" on the lives of young, unarmed African American men and women in the United States. Stand Your Ground law/Castle Doctrine has become the tool of legal lynching in the United States. Across varied and diverse communities, leaders are grappling with this phenomenon with a sense of urgency. This qualitative…

The 115 community colleges in California fulfill an essential role in providing quality educational experiences for a diverse adult student population. However, U.S.-educated language minority (US-LM) students remain largely invisible in this educational context as current admissions and placement procedures do not account for their complex…

This article uses the question "Can government and businesses mandate the COVID-19 vaccine?" as a starting point for an interdisciplinary lesson appropriate for a variety of business law classes. This lesson includes several important overlapping learning goals: (1) It expands students' ability to analyze how the complexity associated…

Neoliberalism has become the hegemonic rationality of our time, framing nearly every aspect of our social world in terms of competition. This dissertation sheds light on neoliberal infiltration and naturalization within the field of language education through three distinct but interrelated papers. "In Discourses of Dual Language Bilingual…

Across the country, career pathways programs are a popular bipartisan tool for addressing state workforce shortages and ensuring students graduate high school with workforce-ready skills. Delaware Pathways is one such example, formally established by executive order in 2016 by then-Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. The program consists of state-approved…