This article discusses the historical context, contemporary iterations, and policy processes and political actors that produced Florida's House Bill 1557, which criminalizes discourse in schools, including curricular and instructional materials containing any perceived reference to LGBTQIA+ identities. Implementation and considerations of H.B.…

The rapid growth of special needs vouchers has been accompanied by the loss of historic civil rights and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We examine three of the largest special needs voucher programs in the United States: those in Florida, Georgia and Ohio.…

Recent Florida legislation (SPB 7044) should be viewed with much concern and with skepticism as to the intent of the bill and its unintended consequences. The bill requires state colleges and universities to seek reaffirmation from different accrediting organizations at the end of each review cycle. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation…

Recent state legislative developments have brought accreditation to the forefront of public higher education conversations. Some accreditation critics state that accreditors have too much influence in higher education suggesting that their efforts may affect institutional autonomy and that they are allegedly structured as legalized monopolies…

The purpose of this technical assistance paper is to assist education leaders and administrators in the consistent implementation of the Florida Career and Professional Education (CAPE) Act in Section 1003.491, Florida Statutes (F.S.). This technical assistance paper addresses questions on recent legislation, funding, and data reporting. [For the…

Scholars and legal practitioners of voting rights are concerned with estimating individual-level voting behavior from aggregate-level data. The most commonly used technique, King's ecological inference (EI), has been questioned for inflexibility in multiethnic settings or with multiple candidates. One method for estimating vote support for…

Since the implementation of the legislation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Title I there is one group to which the achievement gap has widened: the Black male. Not only are Black males are in the lowest percentage on every marker of educational success (Kirp, 2010). Black males lead the percentages for every negative educational…

Decades of federal and state education legislation enacted to increase student academic achievement and enhance school quality have pronounced impacts on teachers and their instructional practice. That impact is captured in the term intensification. Intensification is multifaceted and manifests as additional tasks accomplished simultaneously, with…

Polarization in the United States and controversy over the teaching of content some deem "divisive" has resulted in the enactment of restrictive legislation in many states. Such constraints contribute to a fraught environment in schools today and significantly impact the work of teaching. Utilizing frameworks of "ambitious…

EPS contracted with LXD Research, a third-party research company, to examine the relationship between progress in S.P.I.R.E. and student reading outcomes at Martin County School District in Florida. LXD Research analyzed 192 students from grades 3-5 in 13 elementary schools who use S.P.I.R.E./i.S.P.I.R.E. reading intervention that uses an…

Background/significance: Standards-based accountability systems have been a pillar of education reform in the United States for almost three decades. Although accountability systems have evolved in progressive reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the underlying theory of action has changed little. The basic…

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is now more than twenty years beyond its inception when it was built on the concept that digital materials make learning content easy to reuse and share. This report discusses current legislative trends in OER and offers recommended OER practices for states.

Children in foster care are a vulnerable population in the United States K-12 education system. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative multiple-case study was to understand the perceptions of high school teachers, school social workers, and child welfare case managers regarding foster care and school collaboration protocols and supports put…

Florida Senate Bill 1720 drastically changed developmental education, beginning in fall 2014. This paper considers affected faculty members' perceptions and experiences with the passage and implementation of reform, according to focus group data provided by 294 participants at 21 Florida College System institutions between 2014 and 2019. We found…

Many states report school performance grades as a way to inform the public about school quality. However, past research has shown that when these grades drew largely on proficiency-based measures, they served to capture variation in school and community demographics rather than school quality. We extend this literature by examining whether a…