This policy-interested South Australian public education case study problematises how the Chief Executive (CE) and members of the Education Department's Senior Executive Group (SEG) understood system and school improvement from 2018 to 2022. We applied Carol Bacchi's, "What's the Problem Represented to be?"(WPR) policy analysis framework…

School library media specialists often lead the charge for media and information literacy in schools, and where there is instruction, libraries are the primary hubs for it. As they craft policies and build infrastructure for media literacy instruction, state leaders should leverage librarians' expertise. It should not be solely their…

Open enrollment in public schools is a form of school choice that allows students to attend schools other than the one assigned to them by their school district. Though often less visible than policies such as charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts, K-12 open enrollment is rising in popularity across the nation, and 73 percent…

Given the growing concerns regarding the education of the rapidly increasing refugee children population around the world and the scholarly attention towards refugee education contexts in educational leadership and policy fields in recent years, we were urged to locate and understand the research contribution to the relevant knowledge base. This…

In this essay, we explore the concept of path dependence through the example of the long-standing issue of racialized exclusionary school discipline. We argue that historians of education can reduce policy makers' tendency to continue down existing policy paths (especially unhelpful ones), a phenomenon known as "path dependence." We use…

For decades, policymakers in the U.S. have leveraged accountability policy as a governing tool to lift school performance and close the achievement gap. Accountability become so widespread that it arguably became a "policy paradigm" with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002. Yet after just 13 years of…

Do international large-scale assessments influence education policy? How? Through scripts, lessons, or incentives? For some, they all produce similar outcomes. For others, different assessment data, shaped by different designs, and mediated by international organizations' (IOs) policy directives, prompt different policy decisions. For some,…

There is a movement to improve alignment between the early childhood and K-12 education sectors, which I term The Alignment Agenda. This qualitative study provides an in-depth description of this agenda through analysis of data from interviews with 25 elites (e.g., state director of early learning) associated with the agenda and associated…

Little research examines the experiences and perspectives of Asian American parents who participate in K-12 desegregation efforts, such as magnet schools. Conceptually framed by research on Asian American racialization, this qualitative case study investigates 10 Asian American parents in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut; and the motivations…

Teach For All (TFAll) is global network of programs based on Teach For America. Since 2007, TFAll has spread to more than 60 countries and had a considerable impact on educational policy across educational jurisdictions. Scant research, however, has examined 'shadow' programs based on this model but unaffiliated with TFAll, such as Teach For…

In the wake of racial justice protests in the United States, many states adopted policies to constrain the discussion of racism, particularly contemporary and systemic racism, in K-12 classrooms. Discursively framed as "critical race theory bans," these policies enumerate lists of "prohibited concepts" to be eliminated from…

The following papers, presented as a three-paper series format, discuss the implications of targeting three key, foundational problems within K-12 education. Designing solutions for policy or systemic problems requires more than just creativity. Since public education faces a myriad of crises, it falls under the term "wicked problem"…

Public education funding is a complex matter. It is widely understood that dollars for public schools come from federal, state, and local sources, but the revenue stream from each source is calculated in complex formulas and criteria that can make it hard for anyone to understand the system fully. Calculating aid based on some measure of the…

We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years,…

Education policy research has seen a growing interest in the consequences of teacher trade unionism of global education reform. Less attention has been paid to teacher unions as strategic social actors attempting to influence both national education policy and employment relations at the school level. Addressing this topic, the article examines…