This article highlights the State-Wide Read Aloud Days of the picturebook "My Shadow is Purple" (Stuart, 2022) held across and beyond the state of Georgia in response to the firing of elementary school teacher Katie Rinderle under Georgia's trio of censorship laws. The goals for this article are to: (1) document and analyze the emergence…

The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) was adopted by the California Legislature in 2013. The LCFF made fundamental changes in the way the state funds school districts and charter schools (Local Education Authorities or LEAs), shifting decisions about how to spend resources from the state to the local level. The LCFF also introduced a new…

Children who are English learners (ELs) comprise a large, diverse, and growing student group in U.S. schools. ELs face systemic educational challenges rooted in language, race, class, and nativity. The Century Foundation and Children's Equity Project constructed a first-of-its-kind database covering more than 1,600 dual-language immersion (DLI)…

It is essential that HPERD professionals work together to be spokespeople for their areas at the local, state, and national levels. But what does it look like and how does it happen? The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of advocacy across these three levels, and to provide health and physical educators with some concrete…

The recent midterm elections brought New England two new governors. Rhode Island elected its first woman chief executive in Gina Raimondo (D). Massachusetts elected Charlie Baker (R), a former Harvard Pilgrim CEO and official in the Weld and Cellucci administrations. Otherwise, the New England corner offices cautiously welcomed back incumbents:…

The Virginia Board of Education is committed to the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) program and opposed to adoption of the newly developed Common Core State Standards as a prerequisite for participation in federal competitive grant and entitlement programs. The Standards of Learning are clear and rigorous and have won the acceptance and trust…

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, large-scale assessments have come to play a central role in federal and state education accountability systems. Teachers and parents have expressed a number of concerns about their state testing programs, such as too much time devoted to testing and the high-stakes use of testing for teacher evaluation.…

Environmental educators have long dealt with the charge that the practice of teaching about environmental issues is an attempt to introduce a liberal agenda into the classroom curriculum. However, traditionally Republican states and traditionally Democratic states are both among the nation's leaders and laggards in institutionalizing environmental…

Over the past two decades, state governments have increasingly invested in programs to recruit accomplished scientists from elsewhere to university positions. This event history analysis suggests that an intriguing mix of comparative state disadvantage and leveragable existing research resources is associated with the likelihood of states adopting…

Superintendents and other school administrators live with tensions in political economy. The voting public believes school funding is fixed when the economy expands and new state programs are introduced. Administrators are publicly criticized when, strained for resources, their schools cannot perform within the "do more with less" paradigm. This…

Interdistrict open enrollment is the nation's largest and most widespread school choice program, but our knowledge of these programs is limited. Drawing on 5 years of student-level data from the universe of public school attendees in Colorado, we perform a three-stage analysis to examine the dynamics of student participation in the state's…

In 2006, Michigan changed their traditional merit award to a credit contingent program based upon successful completion of 60 college credits. The Michigan Promise Scholarship was crafted by state policymakers without input from the financial aid community. This case study suggests that the change in policy resulted in two unintended consequences:…

This report documents how four state education agencies are supporting local data-driven decisionmaking through their policies, practices, and programs for creating data systems, improving data access and use, and building district and school capacity to use data. Specifically, this report, responding to District of Columbia Office of State…

This report documents how four state education agencies are supporting local data-driven decisionmaking through their policies, practices, and programs for creating data systems, improving data access and use, and building district and school capacity to use data. Responding to District of Columbia Office of State Superintendent of Education and…

The number of students attending afterschool programs has skyrocketed in recent years, currently serving an estimated 8.4 million children (Afterschool Alliance, 2009). Consequently, the demand for high quality afterschool programs, and to learn from successful ones, has never been greater. This "Making Afterschool Programs Better"…