The commentary argues that we need to address the wide variance in school building quality under and after COVID-19. Evidence suggests that historical underinvestment in school facility capital and maintenance has created unhealthy school buildings across the nation. Federal funding and research is necessary to ensure that schools are healthy…

In this special issue response paper, we pick up from prior discussions to suggest areas where we think policy sociology can benefit from further conversation and research. In particular, we bring together our respective readings and work on policy mobilities, in conversation with the contributions of this special issue, to think further about…

In this policy forum commentary, we call for improved national and state-level data collection and access relevant to the principal pipeline. We focus specifically on how access to quality data can inform, has informed, and is critical to policy and practice across three segments of the principal pipeline--principal preparation, licensure, and…

This paper is concerned with the developments of inclusive education policies and their impact on teacher education in Austria today. As we argue, most policies concerning inclusive education are still reduced to a focus on disability. Such an approach can be explained, but not legitimised, by the historical development of the education of…

Despite abundant data and increasing data availability brought by technological advances, there has been very limited education policy studies that have capitalized on big data--characterized by large volume, wide variety, and high velocity. Drawing on the recent progress of using big data in public policy and computational social science…

The distinction between external assessment and internal assessment underpins a major reform to vocational qualifications underway in England. To be approved by the Department for Education, vocational qualifications must now include a minimum proportion of external assessment, regardless of subject. This paper discusses the nature and…

This is a reflective opinion piece, on our efforts in Australia to achieve alignment between the goals of Indigenous self-determination, Indigenous studies programmes and decolonising theory for an open and critical dialogue in south-south scholarship agendas. In this spirit, extant approaches to Indigenous studies in the Australian higher…

In this paper, I have positioned myself with Kean Birch and explored some of the political-economic actors/actants of policy suites implicated in the biotechnologies and bioeconomy. In particular, I have considered Australia's recent National Innovation and Science Agenda and allied documents and entities (that is, Innovation and Science…

Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump did not emphasize education policy during his campaign, though he proposed a $20 billion program to promote school choice, derided Common Core, and even floated the idea of eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. As for higher education, Trump expressed concern over student debt and proposed a partial…

This special issue is dedicated to understanding how to best support positive educational outcomes for all students. While reading strategies, course design and methods, testing and assessment, and a variety of other factors are all integral to L2 reading outcomes, policies constructed at the federal, state, district, and school level play an…

In this response article, I draw on critical realist perspectives to engage with the argument put forward in Bengtsson's study, which sees agency as an ontological necessity for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) policy engagement. Bengtsson supports a notion of the logic of contingent action over the logic of power as dominance,…

Robinson et al. ("Educ Psychol Rev" 25(2):291-302, 2013) offer a thoughtful and powerful argument for a policy change for primary educational research journals. This policy change would "disallow recommendations for practice" (p. 10) in primary educational research journals. They provided compelling examples of works in which…

In their article, "The Common Core is a Change for the Better," Gardner and Powell (2013) make an argument in support of implementing the Common Core to improve teaching and student learning. They opine the Common Core will enable students to become more college and career ready and state the Common Core standards will provide…

Policy borrowing and policy travelling are words that are often used to mean the same process to different policy practitioners across the globe. Nevertheless, these ideas are also riddled with both ethical as well as political undertones, such that interchanging them becomes problematic. In reflecting on and responding to some of these debates,…

In this technical comment, we argue that Morgan et al.'s claim that there is no minority overrepresentation in special education is in error due to (a) sampling considerations, (b) inadequate support from previous and current analyses, and (c) their failure to consider the complexities of special education disproportionality. [For Morgan et al.'s…