In recent years, the push to recognize adults as an important segment of those seeking postsecondary education and training has gained traction. Through setting credential attainment goals, many states realized they needed to make a concerted effort to engage or re-engage adults in postsecondary education in order to reach those goals and meet…

California voters signaled their funding priorities by passing a $10 billion state bond for education facilities last November. California's K-12 public schools are expanding their reach with universal transitional kindergarten and dual enrollment in high schools. But K-12 schools face many challenges, including lagging student test scores,…

State governments enact hundreds of policies a year intended to improve outcomes for students. If these policies were self-executing, the impact on American education would be swift and dramatic, and the system today would look profoundly different than it did just one year ago. But the reality is that how a policy is implemented often affects…

Public debates around whether and how teachers should discuss topics related to race and gender in the classroom have turned classrooms into political battlegrounds. Between April 2021 and January 2023, 18 states passed policies restricting teachers' instruction. Many of these state policies restrict teachers' instruction on topics related to race…

Leveraging racial sensemaking and constructive-developmental frameworks, this study investigates how school leaders implementing culturally responsive-sustaining education make sense of racism, and how their racial beliefs change over time. Given New York State's mandate that educators implement culturally responsive-sustaining education, it made…

State policies to expand computer science (CS) education have popped up nearly everywhere since 2016. This acceleration speaks well to the collaborative work of state boards of education, intermediary and national organizations, state legislatures, and governors who championed those policies. It also speaks to the urgency of increasing all…

Unlike vouchers and tax credit scholarships that do not allow parents to customize their children's education, Education savings accounts (ESAs) provide funding to pay for part-time classes at public and private schools, tutoring, curricula, services for special needs, and more. As navigating the opportunities that come with ESAs can be difficult,…

Federal law defines English learner (EL) eligibility differently for Indigenous, compared to non-Indigenous, students, allowing for broader entry into the EL category, along with its accompanying resources and services. We interviewed EL leaders from 25 state departments of education to learn about their level of understanding of the…

The Aurora Institute has released state policy recommendations to enable our education system to transition from an industrial age "one-size-fits-all" model, to a future-focused model that supports education innovation, student agency, builds knowledge, and prioritizes mastery of skills and knowledge over seat time. The six identified…

In this dissertation, I study the relationships between financial aid, student characteristics, persistence, and completion in three separate chapters. In all three chapters, I use detailed, student-level administrative data from the UNC System beginning in the Fall 2013 semester. The first chapter is entitled "Tuition Reduction and Student…

Background: As attention to the potential negative outcomes of childhood trauma has grown, so have calls for schools to take an active role in supporting students experiencing trauma. These calls extend beyond efforts initiated by individual schools to include those mandated by state law, which largely focus on teacher training and on screening…

This two-way, fixed effects analysis examines the relationship between local appropriations and community college state governance structures while examining governance's moderating impact on state-level factors. We find that any type of state-level organization for community colleges does not impact local appropriations, and that in states with…

This article provides an overview of recent changes to state-level dyslexia legislation. It begins by applying a variant of Kingdon's multiple streams approach to explain how the dyslexia education "policy window" came to be opened. The article then describes the most likely effects and side effects of the new laws. Likely short-term…

In the wake of declining state support for higher education, many state leaders have adopted lottery earmark policies, which designate lottery revenue to higher education budgets as an alternative funding mechanism. However, despite the ubiquity of lottery earmarks for higher education, it remains unclear whether this new source of revenue serves…

This 50-State Comparison provides data on states' early care and education governance systems, with a focus on the agencies that oversee these programs, the level of alignment of these programs and the advisory entities for early care and education in the state. This data point shows what year the early care and education governance entity was…