School improvement planning can serve as a mechanism for school leaders to identify and address inequities. Yet, despite longstanding mandates, the empirical evidence base on school improvement plans (SIPs) is surprisingly limited, and even less literature focuses on the intersection of equity and school improvement planning. Using a conventional…

Tuition levels in the US have been rising at an above-the-inflation pace, leading to spiraling student debt levels and negative effects on students' well-being. While student outcomes of rising tuition are well known, the political reasons behind the decisions of policy makers to contain tuition increases or not remain poorly understood. In this…

Public service internships are an established pedagogical tool in political science. Decades of scholarship on teaching and learning highlight how hands-on practicums can enhance students' substantive learning, professional development, civic values, and multicultural tolerance. Despite the proliferation of research on the student benefits of…

This study contributes one of the first explorations into how provincial governments shaped the WCU building discourse in tandem with universities. Using a resource dependence approach and insights from institutional isomorphism, it develops a conceptual framework with three perspectives (national government, provincial governments and…

Numerous policies and reforms have been proposed and implemented to increase accountability and improve performance in higher education in the United States (U.S.), which has included an emphasis on the state's role in authorizing colleges and universities to operate and award degrees. The recent surge in peer-reviewed and grey literature has…

Legislative professionalism is central to the politico-institutional context of postsecondary policy adoption in state governments. The core argument in existing research is that as legislative professionalism increases, structural capacity for decision-making increases. Evidence for this argument is mixed, exclusively quantitative, and assumes a…

Every year, State of the State addresses offer time for new and incumbent governors to outline policy priorities and celebrate state accomplishments. Since 2005, we've tracked, analyzed and identified education policy trends in governors' State of the State addresses to help you understand trending education issues across states. This year's…

This article examines how the concept of freedom has been appropriated by the far right to impose a number of authoritarian policies designed to dismantle the critical functions of public and higher education. It explores, in particular, the ways in which Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has used an appeal to freedom to punish critics,…

Courts have been reluctant to fully embrace free exercise or equal protection claims of school choice advocates, but recent rulings may have permanently reversed that trend, potentially compelling governments to provide substantially more resources to parochial schools than ever before. The first section of this article summarizes the origin of…

Prior to the passing of California Assembly Bill 20 (AB20) and the implementation of the California Model Agreement (CMA) in 2015, the proposal and award process for the California public university systems and the state of California was slow-moving, administratively burdensome, and inconsistent in contracting for research, training, and public…

This paper provides an overview of the United States higher education system. It gives readers introductory information about the size, scope and governance model of US higher education. This is a challenging task because higher education in the US is highly decentralized with no single 'system' coordinating all institutions of higher education…

The creation of the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program provides a natural experiment where a difference-in-differences estimation design is employed to isolate how state merit aid funding may lead institutions to change their institutional grant aid. Principal agent and resource dependence theories together establish state and…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was designed to remedy the wrongs of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Yet Andrew Saultz, Jack Schneider, and Karalyn McGovern explain that, so far, it has failed to fundamentally alter how the federal government interacts with schools. They discuss the need for federal authority over issues of equity in education…

Public higher education faces a crisis in the twenty-first century. While a college education has never been more vital to individual and societal success, state governments have increasingly withdrawn their support for public colleges and universities. National trends suggest that reductions in state funding for public higher education will not…

This guidebook is designed to support state and local leaders in the first step in the improvement process, the development and facilitation of a needs assessment. The guidebook does the following: (1) Reviews some of the major school-improvement-related needs assessment requirements found in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as…