This paper provides an analysis of Australia's legal provisions and policies regarding truancy. We examine how low frequency truants feature in Australia's truancy law and policy and highlight similarities and differences in the cultural-legal context between Australian states and territories. Similarities include requirements to attend school…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Combatting Classroom Censorship." Contents include: (1) A Wolf in Sheep's…

The United States' changing legal landscape over the past few years has compromised schools' ability to explicitly support their LGBTQ + students, colleagues, and families. Many perceived the overturning of the landmark court case, "Roe v. Wade" with the "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" Supreme Court of the United…

Charter schools and district schools are both public schools serving public school students and operating within the same public education ecosystem. For nearly as long as charter schools have been in existence, there has been concern about how these innovative public schools that generally sit outside the jurisdiction of the school district might…

2022 turned out to be a dynamic year for charter schools, as many state lawmakers recognized the fact parents want more schooling options that fit their children's unique needs. In total, close to 50% of states with charter school laws gained at least one legislative win. Read for more details on how the charter school movement strengthened in the…

The surveillance and securitization of schools has transformed over the last decade to include predictive analytics and algorithms. In Florida, for example, the Pasco Sheriff's Office used school record data sets to identify and monitor youth they believed were "destined for a life of crime." Yet the extent of big data policing as a…

The growth of state laws creating private school vouchers and charter schools has mounting and alarming ramifications for students' rights, and those ramifications are shaped by a complex and shifting set of legal rules. This article explains the interplay between the increase of these school-choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court's recent…

School leadership has progressed from a principal-led position to a dual-leader position with assistant principals. Assistant principals have stepped into instructional leadership roles and have been identified as overseeing special education (Best, 2016; Gaston, 2005; Walton, 2008). Despite studies determining that assistant principals are…

The social maladjustment exclusionary clause has been a source of contention and confusion for the last 50 years. Social maladjustment has never been defined at the federal level, leaving creating the definition to local and state agencies. Social maladjusted was not included in the original definition created by Eli Bower in the 1960s. It was…

"Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" is a new data analysis that examines enrollment trends during the last four school years (2019-2023). Over the last four school years (2019-20 to 2022-23), charter schools have gained more than…

School disturbance laws, unfair disciplinary policies, and law enforcement officers' presence on public school grounds perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline throughout the United States. The problem is South Carolina's Disturbing Schools Law could be perpetuating a version of the school-to-prison pipeline. The purpose of the study was to…

Children with disabilities or specialized healthcare needs were legally excluded from U.S. public education for decades, but in the last 45 years, they have gained tremendous ground in receiving comparable educational opportunities as their non-disabled peers. The purpose of this article is to provide a historical review of the educational laws…

Education Law Center's "Making the Grade" is an annual overview of the condition of school finance in the states. Using the most recently available data from the 2021-2022 school year, the report ranks and grades each state on three measures to answer the key question: How fair is school funding in your state? The three fairness measures…

The Pledge of Allegiance is a culturally essential--and often legally mandated--daily exercise in many schools. With societal focus on patriotic exercises and many individuals' subsequent refusal to engage in these exercises, it is important for preservice and inservice teachers to examine their approaches to students who refuse to recite the…

The American educational policy agenda has been fraught with neoliberal laws that center educational improvement and innovation (Barros, 2012). Neoliberalism operates on the premise that market competition will spur excellence in educational opportunities and decrease the education debt in marginalized communities (Fejes & Salling Olesen,…