To best train and support school leaders in their evolving roles, they require high-quality preparation and in-service pipelines that both address the changing demands on their positions and acknowledge the cascading effects that well-prepared leaders have on both student outcomes and in school culture and retention. Including school leaders in…

Transgender and nonbinary (collectively referred to here as "trans") students are ill-served by most school environments. They experience challenges trying to navigate institutions that, at best, are poorly designed to support them and that often work against them. Although some districts and states have developed laws and policies to…

English learner (EL) education is widely conceived as services for immigrant-origin students, however nearly one in ten American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students are classified in school as ELs. Title III of the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) defines EL eligibility differently for Indigenous, compared to non-Indigenous,…

This brief summarizes a study of five school districts that have been recognized for their efforts to provide high-quality services to students experiencing homelessness. The districts worked hard to identify students experiencing homelessness and supplemented modest federal funds with private funding, district funding, community-based resources,…

High-quality early learning experiences (i.e., developmentally appropriate, play-based instruction with clear learning goals) have positive long-term effects on student outcomes. As California rolls out Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK), district leaders focused on meeting state requirements for hiring qualified staff and finding…

This dissertation explores the issue of under-representation of women in STEM fields in high school and the early years of college. One of the major contributors to the persisting gender earnings gap is male-domination in the STEM workforce. Women are under-represented in STEM occupations since they are less likely than men to take advanced STEM…

New analyses by researchers across the ideological spectrum have found that increasing overall funding for schools can improve student achievement, particularly for low-income students. However, the growing consensus is that strategic state policies are needed to substantially increase the size of the impact of additional funding. These policies…

Efforts to prevent or persuade increased emphasis on academic research at state colleges and regional universities demonstrate how emerging fields of higher education can be influenced through various policies and incentives. Utilizing the concept of strategic action fields (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012), this paper explains changes in…

Background: Scholars have increasingly expressed concern about a new secessionist movement, grounded in a doctrine of localism and facilitated by permissive state policies regarding the formation of new school districts. Critics contend that school district secessions threaten to exacerbate patterns of segregation and inequality in schools.…

Background: Exclusionary discipline (e.g. suspension and expulsion) is associated with lower student achievement, drop-out, and involvement in the juvenile justice system. Recently, states and school districts have begun to restrict exclusionary discipline, but there remains much to be learned about the potential impact on students. Research…

Dominant explanations of state higher education policy tend to emphasize economic models that foreground the business cycle or political approaches that cast ideology as fairly fixed. We instead foreground changing social context to conceptualize state appropriations as predicted not only by these classic explanations, but also by the interplay of…

Research Findings In this study, we examined states' kindergarten entry assessment (KEA) policies between 2011 and 2018 and the possible impact federal funding policies may have had in their implementation. Between 2011 and 2018, 31 states received federal Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge awards and/or Enhanced Assessment Grants to support…

Two consequentially related education policy topics in the United States are kindergarten entry assessments (KEAs) and the growing number of students who are "English learners" (ELs). In this study, I compared the content of, and home language use policies for six state KEAs, all of which were comprised of items from the GOLD®…

The article discusses salient factors that influence the current context within which homeschooling occurs. Individual states have applied various approaches to establish regulations that both preserve the rights of homeschooling parents and fulfill the state's obligation to ensure that its residents receive the education to which they are…

Recognizing the essential value of the arts, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) included the arts as an indicator of school quality and student success in the state's Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plan, which the U.S. Department of Education approved in August 2017. The indicator currently has no weight in Illinois's accountability…