The "Brown" decision represents a watershed moment in U.S. history as the remedy served as a guiding light during a pandemic. A pandemic is an epidemic taking place on a scale that spans the globe. A circumstance is not a pandemic merely because it exists in different regions of the world or results in the death of many people; it must…

The intensities of the contemporary moment continue to prompt reflections on the strengths and limitations of approaches typically used to study education policy reform. The central contention of this essay is that policy sociology and its application within education offers needed vantage points on contemporary pressing global policy problems.…

This essay offers a framework for broader community involvement as a means of increasing the relevance and usefulness of evidence developed. This essay begins by defining key concepts related to democratizing the development of evidence. The sections that follow outline a logic model that calls for a bidirectional, iterative set of core activities…

Public accountability through information disclosure is a pillar of modern education reform efforts. Despite the ubiquity of this approach, we argue that public accountability in education is undertheorized and often predictably unlikely to achieve its intended policy goals. Drawing on examples from an equity-oriented court case in California and…

This essay coins and conceptualizes the term "publicwashing." In educational systems and organizations, publicwashing is a symbolic communication that emphasizes organizational publicness for the purpose of a superficial repair of reputation. The essay defines publicwashing and describes its motives and manifestations. Additionally, it…

Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I…

Concern about harsh and inequitable discipline over the past two decades has galvanized a host of discipline reforms. These reforms have gained renewed attention in recent months as both the COVID-19 pandemic and mass uprisings against anti-Black violence have both bolstered calls to reimagine schools as caring spaces. This moment raises urgent…

Researchers commonly interpret effect sizes by applying benchmarks proposed by Jacob Cohen over a half century ago. However, effects that are small by Cohen's standards are large relative to the impacts of most field-based interventions. These benchmarks also fail to consider important differences in study features, program costs, and scalability.…

Recent efforts to improve the quality and availability of scientific research in education, coupled with increased expectations for the use of research in practice, demand new ways of thinking about connections between research and practice. The conceptual framework presented in this paper argues that increasing research in educational…

The environment of U.S. schools has changed dramatically over a quarter century as standards tied to test-based accountability and market competition became commonplace. We examine the issues that school systems face in this changing environment, to identify considerations for researchers interested in reform as educational system building. We…

An analysis was conducted of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) research evidence base on the effectiveness of replicable education interventions. Most interventions were found to have little or no support from technically adequate research studies, and intervention effect sizes were of questionable magnitude to meet education policy goals. These…

The widely publicized opposition to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is in marked contrast to its relatively uncontroversial development and adoption--a contrast that points to the importance of understanding how the politics of enactment differs from the politics of implementation. In this article, we draw on the…

In 2009, the New Teacher Project's "The Widget Effect" documented the failure of U.S. public school districts to recognize and act on differences in teacher effectiveness. We revisit these findings by compiling teacher performance ratings across 24 states that adopted major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. In the vast…

We examine the distinction between teaching and teachers as it relates to instructional improvement. Drawing from work outside of education on improvement systems and from analyzing the Japanese system of lesson study, we contend that a focus on teaching can shape a coordinated system for improvement whereas a focus on teachers, common in the…

Building on the premise that closing achievement gaps is an economic imperative both to regain international educational supremacy and to maintain global economic competitiveness, I ask whether it is possible to rewrite the social contract so that education is a fundamental right--a statutory guarantee--that is both uniform across states and…