Massive school closures are occurring in urban school districts across the United States. Research suggests that school closures are the outcome of racialized neoliberal policies and decades of disinvestment that have left many urban districts with fiscal deficits and declining student enrollments. However, some urban communities have successfully…

Previous studies have shown that state performance funding policies do not increase baccalaureate degree production, but higher education scholarship lacks a rigorous, quantitative analysis of the unintended consequences of performance funding. In this article, we use difference-in-differences estimation with fixed effects to evaluate performance…

Background/Context: This paper is in dialogue with critical policy scholarship that has developed a certain consensus about what neoliberalism is and what its impact has been on recent education policy. A substantial part of the paper comprises a synthesis of recent German scholarship on neoliberal education policies in that country.…

This paper focuses on policy implementation in Higher Education (HE) analysed through the evolution and transformation of policy instruments related to government funding and evaluation. We investigate how steering and governance tools have been put into action, in order to analyse how original policy rationales and justifications have evolved and…

It is argued that free-tuition higher education increases opportunity for underrepresented students with positive equity implications. Moreover, access to higher education for free expands existing visions of equal opportunity, as it changes aspirations and behavior. In 2015, Tennessee became the first state in the nation to implement a universal…

This report provides an overview of key policy developments in education, training, and employment in Armenia. The paper contains sections that review the country's key demographic and economic characteristics; education and training trends, challenges, policy and institutional setting; and labour market and employment trends, challenges, policy…

Policy analyses frequently clash. Their disagreements stem from many sources, including models, empirical estimates, and values such as who should have standing and how different criteria should be weighted. We provide a simple taxonomy of disagreement, identifying distinct categories within both the positive and values domains of normative policy…

Background/Context: This article employs critical policy analysis as it examines the historical underpinnings of racialized policy discrimination in Detroit. It considers histories, discourses, and oppressive structures as it seeks to understand how policies have been and currently are implemented by Whites in predominantly Black urban areas.…

At the present, human capital theory (HCT) and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, HCT has provided an economic understanding of human beings and offered strategies to manage the population with the promise of bringing improvements to nations. Neuroscience…

In this technical comment, we argue that Morgan et al.'s claim that there is no minority overrepresentation in special education is in error due to (a) sampling considerations, (b) inadequate support from previous and current analyses, and (c) their failure to consider the complexities of special education disproportionality. [For Morgan et al.'s…

A major role of all public higher education institutions is to foster the public good. In democratic societies, the public good emphasizes the more collective activities and benefits and how resources are accessible to all in a society. Institutions of higher education create new knowledge, promote cultural tolerance, increase civic activity, and…

This article analyzes how the Obama administration used executive power to grant waivers from federal education policies and assesses whether they used this power differently than previous administrations and in other sectors (e.g., health or welfare). The executive use of waivers to shape state policy is not a new trend. However, we find that…

Schools should be safe, nurturing, and welcoming environments for all students. Frequently, exclusionary school discipline practices, which remove students from the classroom--even for minor infractions of school rules--through suspension or expulsion, prevent students from participating fully in their education. Suspensions, expulsions, and other…

In this article, we explore how the World Bank operationalizes its focus on poverty alleviation in one of the most controversial arenas of educational change: the expansion of privately provided schooling. We argue that the Bank's role in promoting private provision has been far more complicated than most critics have discerned. It has…

Policy borrowing and policy travelling are words that are often used to mean the same process to different policy practitioners across the globe. Nevertheless, these ideas are also riddled with both ethical as well as political undertones, such that interchanging them becomes problematic. In reflecting on and responding to some of these debates,…