In this column, Sandro Galea addresses what would be required to identify and implement solutions that can improve the health of populations. Galea suggests that two perspectives need to inform solutions that might prove successful. First, solutions that aim to improve the health of populations need to be grounded in clarity of purpose, aiming to…

Educational philosophy, broadly speaking, has turned sharply in the direction of nonideal theorizing in recent years. The thesis of this paper is that this turn is premature, and will ultimately bear very little fruit for educational philosophy as a discipline. The author's argument proceeds through a discussion of the history of nonideal theory…

'The knowledge question', addressing what students need to know and learn, becomes particularly relevant during the process of a new school reform. This paper examines the political messages and the role of knowledge in the current curriculum reform initiative for primary and secondary education in Norway (2020). The study is based on a document…

South Sudan was embroiled in a civil war from mid-December 2013 to mid-September 2018. Nearly 400,000 people died, and several million were displaced. The economy nearly collapsed as the nation's output was severely reduced, causing inflation to soar. While prior research on the immediate humanitarian crisis in South Sudan has focused on forced…

The historical and political emergence of STEM has changed the educational paradigm. Researchers, educators, and frontline professionals consider STEM as their savior. However, the ambiguity surrounding STEM and its successors, Integrated STEM education, and STEAM has created confusion for educators and frontline workers about which framework and…

International education has become a policy sector of increasing importance to the Canadian province of Manitoba. Provincial governments with opposing political ideologies can impact international education policy differently. Using narratives as an analytical framework, we identify themes by examining the approaches taken to the international…

School rezoning, or redistricting, is the process by which school boards draw and redraw school attendance boundaries. These boundaries are key drivers of racial and economic school segregation but can also work to ameliorate it. Using a critical orientation to narrative policy analysis, this study examined the cultural politics of race and…

This report by the Special Committee on Governance, Academic Free­dom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina (UNC) system considers the influence of the gerrymandered North Carolina state legislature on the systemwide board of governors and campus boards of trustees and how political pressure has obstructed meaningful…

With the rise of polarization and extremism, the question of how best to transmit civic virtues across generations is more acute than ever. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that schools can be the place for this transmission by empowering students and gathering them around concrete and democratically chosen objectives. We draw on an RCT…

This poll was conducted between October 7-9, 2022 among a sample of 2,200 adults. The interviews were conducted online and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of adults based on gender, educational attainment, age, race, and region. Among the key findings are: (1) School parents are much more pessimistic about how their friends'…

According to Brenan (2021), 77% of Americans are concerned about the morals and values in America. Morality is embedded in the foundation of the United States and its educational system, with ethical dilemmas requiring leaders to be intentional and cognizant (Dahl, 2015; Johnson, 2021; Lickona, 1993; Smith, 2020). The California public educational…

In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of losing candidates. We find that student test scores in…

This article reviews the development of my thesis that the California Supreme Court's Serrano decisions, which began in 1971 and sought to disconnect district school spending with local property taxes, led to the fiscal conditions that caused California voters to embrace Proposition 13 in 1978, which radically undermined the local property tax…

This essay explores how women scholars grapple with gender and racial inequality during a syndemic. Using a culturally comparative lens, two mother-scholars, one Afro-Boricua who identifies as Black and the other Thai who identifies as Asian, examine this topic through a comparative international womanist theoretical framework. This discussion…

Recent work in education research and policy studies has been critical of the view that sees education as a fix for social problems. This perspective invites a reconsideration of the relationship between education and society that breaks from the long held instrumental assumptions informing most education theory and policy, wherein education is a…