Literacy coaches serve in a multitude of roles and play a critical role in bridging district and school priorities (Walpole and Blamey, 2008; Steckel, 2009). Currently, coaches and teachers are navigating a national policy shift to Science of Reading (SoR) aligned instruction, and educators want more than a new curriculum (Schwartz, 2022). This…

The study explores the implementation of teacher evaluation models and federal education policies, particularly AchieveNJ, in an urban public school district in New Jersey. It focuses on principals' experiences and perceptions, uncovering their challenges and thoughts on the policy's effectiveness in enhancing teacher performance and student…

Policy analysts often concern themselves with understanding the messiness of implementation. Scholar Milbrey McLaughlin urged scholars to follow the "policy footprint" approach, and this article introduces this concept's application in studying arts education policy implementation. Specifically, I explore several important questions.…

As the day-to-day leaders of a school district, superintendents oversee budgetary and other district operations, help give practical meaning to federal and state policy, and set local district policy for the schools under their charge. Superintendents therefore work in a unique and important leadership space that exists between federal, state,…

The voices of teachers experiencing and reacting to highly-publicized testing scandals are rarely heard, despite high-levels of criticism and blame from many stakeholders. Drawing on Foucault's conception of "disciplinary power" ("hierarchical observation," "normalizing judgment," and "examination")…

This critical case study analyzes Michigan's implementation of Public Act 4 (PA4), also known as the "emergency management" (EM) takeover law. PA4 grants the state control of school districts with dire budgetary problems. As most U.S. school districts are citywide, PA4 gives the state direct control over all the (previously locally…

This article describes a case study of dual language bilingual education (DLBE) that challenges the model's traditional mold while offering important insights into its utility for communities of less commonly taught languages. We begin with an outline of the expansion of DLBE in New York City, part of a broader national trend. We then explore a…

This research brief is Part I of a four-part series that studies the implementation and impact of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) decision to decentralize in the 1990s. This first part describes how decentralization was enacted in HISD. It examines the implementation of decentralization at HISD. The process that HISD originally…

In 1998, the People's Republic of China implemented an education policy, the "School Consolidation Policy", which entailed merging small rural schools with larger ones. It has had a massive effect on rural people across China, and as a result of it, over 60% of schools in outlying areas have closed. The policy's implementation and…

In the spring of 2019, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) at the George Washington University conducted interviews with leaders from five school districts that differed in key characteristics. The aim was to learn about districts' efforts to implement the requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) for using evidence-based approaches…

This research contrasts two urban school districts that serve similar populations yet vary notably with respect to the provision of speech and language services. The results suggest that variation in the provision of speech-language services is driven by district-level variations in budgetary and legal contexts as well as procedural differences.…

State takeovers were an infrequently applied strategy to address financially and academically troubled schools for many decades. The opportunity for a more extensive state role in taking over troubled schools grew further with the announcement of the federal "Race to the Top" (RTTT) program in 2009. RTTT required states to develop plans…

End-of instruction (EOI) examinations are used in several states for high school students as a determining factor for graduation and the receipt of a high school diploma. Given that the EOI examinations have become a gateway to a high school diploma, it is important to understand how demographic distributions are related to examination…

Providing ninth-graders with academic and social support can put more students on the graduation path, but it can be challenging for schools and school systems to implement that support routinely and effectively. This brief describes how Broward County Public Schools adopted a community of practice (CoP) approach to improve school-based teams'…

Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs are framed to reflect pluralist discourses (de Jong, E. [2013]. "Policy Discourses and U.S. Language in Education Policies." "Peabody Journal of Education" 88 (1): 98-111) and affiliated language ideologies. The continued expansion of DLBE programs not surprisingly brings to…