High school students need support learning to evaluate online information. Scholarship in the last several years has explored how to provide this support via lessons that explicitly teach evaluation strategies. In this study, we analyzed classroom conversations in two high school government classrooms during lessons that taught "lateral…

Numerous policies and reforms have been proposed and implemented to increase accountability and improve performance in higher education in the United States (U.S.), which has included an emphasis on the state's role in authorizing colleges and universities to operate and award degrees. The recent surge in peer-reviewed and grey literature has…

As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies. In "Structuring Inequality",…

Despite the essential position of introductory courses within most political science departments' curricula, comprehensive comparisons of introductory requirements for majors have been somewhat rare. In this manuscript, I report on the state of introductory requirements through analyses of data from 381 national liberal arts colleges and…

In this article, Frederick Hess discusses a concept he calls "greenfield schooling." The premise is simple: Profound educational improvement requires more than fine-tuning systems that have evolved over two centuries; it requires policymakers and educational leaders to revisit organizing assumptions about the grammar of schooling. In…

As state political leaders look toward a postpandemic era, they are being presented with complex economic and workforce development challenges that will require intensive, intentional collaboration between business, higher education, and state government. Workforce participation rates remain far below prepandemic levels, businesses continue to…

Women are underrepresented among American legislators and political science majors. One explanation is that gender imbalances propagate through space and time. In this paper, we introduce a paired experiment aimed to assess the downstream attitudinal effects of priming the issue of women's representation. At one predominantly male university and…

This playbook provides ways in which Governors and teams can blur the lines between high school, postsecondary education, and the workforce. Governors play a significant role to Raise the Bar for student success by developing an "education-to-workforce system" that focuses on Unlocking Career Success.

Policymakers have debated how schools should respond when transgender students (students who are assigned one sex at birth but identify with the opposite sex) seek to use facilities or participate in school activities consistent with their gender identity. One prominent area of contention is the participation of transgender athletes in school…

Although most education policy decisions are made at the state level, America has been having a national debate over the future of our schools for the last several years. Arguments have raged over COVID-related closures and the resultant student learning loss, Critical Race Theory, school funding, parental choice, college debt, and more. The 2022…

Significant disproportionality in special education is a persistent problem that has plagued the American public education system for over 50 years. Despite federal, state, and local efforts; this problem has yet to be solved. The persistence of this problem, despite intervention, suggests that significant disproportionality in special education…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act allows states some autonomy in altering the disability category terminology and definitions, given that the changes do not exclude students eligible under the federal language. Several states have used this flexibility for the emotional disturbance category historically. This study provides a…

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…

Private supplementary tutoring, also known as shadow education, has had a profound influence on Chinese education during the past twenty years. The rapid expansion of shadow education has attracted the attention and increased regulation of the Chinese government. In July 2021, the Chinese government adopted one of the most restrictive legislative…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) invited states to use multiple measures of "higher-order thinking skills and understanding," including "extended-performance tasks," to create state assessment systems that support teaching for deeper learning. However, few states have been able to navigate federal assessment requirements…