In the face of ideologically driven inquiry and advocacy, debates about school choice and public-private-partnerships in education have produced more "light than heat." Although scholars have recently emphasized the need for a greater focus on the particulars of policy design, limitations of existing frameworks have inhibited rigorous…

Globally, the issue of research impact has grown as governments articulate policies around research as a contributor to economic and societal development, often through an econometric justification. This has triggered much discussion amongst humanities scholars in public formally-reasoned peer-reviewed texts that are rarely empirically-based. This…

This study aims to explore the panorama of international education development in China from a retrospective policy mapping perspective. In China, international education is closely linked with educational internationalization and opening to the outside world. The internationalization of education in China refers to the cross-border communication,…

Since the peak of the pandemic in 2020, enrollment in virtual schools has steadily increased, with virtual schools now accounting for approximately 1.4% of the nation's public school students. While the effects of the pandemic on student achievement and mental health have been extensively studied, research has yet to thoroughly examine the impact…

In this paper, the authors draw on evolutionary theories of change and qualitative data from 2019-2022, to explore the impact of the pandemic on K-12 virtual education in a state with a long history of virtual schooling by asking: "How has the ongoing COVID pandemic influenced virtual schooling in Oregon?" A virtual school in this study…

Children's health is affected by physical activity (PA) opportunities throughout the school day. Schools are a central venue for children meeting physical activity recommendations, and multiple areas, such as recess, have been established to protect against childhood obesity and overweight. Senate Bill 1083 is a law that addresses recess policies…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) reverses a trend toward centralization of education policy and instead provides greater authority to the states. This study explores states' interpretation and early implementation of ESSA's equity-related provisions. Using a qualitative case study approach, we find wide variation in the design and…

The effective implementation of blended learning for transforming higher education is hindered by a lack of consensus on its definition. There is a dearth of comprehensive attempts to understand blended learning at the intersection of policy documents and academic literature, particularly in the Indian higher education context. This common…

This paper provides an analysis of government-supported workforce development programs in the United States and selected states as of the end of 2024. We provide an overview of the topic of workforce development, defining this to include activities and funding mechanisms that aim to increase the skills of workers and help them succeed in the labor…

This brief is the third annual examination of how state attendance policies and practices have evolved since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. States can play an essential guiding role in the collection, use and public availability of attendance and chronic absence data. While reporting chronic absence on state report cards is required by the…

Language policy is crucial to any society's cultural and political fabric, as it shapes how individuals and groups communicate, interact, and identify. Language policy has important implications for nation-building and the creation of national identity. Language policy can also significantly impact university students' sense of belonging. Overt…

This article explores the relationship between teachers and policymaking, and in particular a contradiction at its center: Teachers are needed to "people" policy, yet are conventionally named as its objects. As part of a two-year participatory study, fourteen teachers in three schools, including the author, sought to investigate policy…

The 2020 health pandemic and high-profile police murders of Black people inspired national conversations about racism and police brutality. This study examined how Intermediary Public Policy Organizations (IPPOs) discursively engaged with the racialized nature of the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd, which have increased awareness of…

The English learner (EL) population has grown by 35% in the last 20 years. However, in addition to new students being identified as ELs, the EL subgroup is being inflated by students who are not being reclassified within a reasonable and developmentally appropriate timeframe. These students, often labeled long term ELs (LTELs), are a product of…

State governments are regularly reexamining the statewide board governance arrangements over public higher education, enacting governance reforms that change the structure or authority granted to boards by state legislatures. While previous research has studied governance reforms, there is a lack of recent studies on such reforms and what…