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.…

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…

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…

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…

In light of recent political events in the United States, and with the urging to consider Noddings' care ethics in early childhood education, this conceptual piece considers an often-overlooked question in political discourse: what are the rights of the child, and how might these be centered in discussions of pedagogy, curricula, and legislation?…

The Race to the Top (RTTT) program incentivized states to use innovation for systemwide improvement of student outcomes, but little is known about how RTTT-funded innovation was sustained after the RTTT program ended. This mixed-methods study examined state and district approaches to sustaining an international innovation called "lesson…

Developmental education (DE) reform took place among the 28 Florida College System (FCS) institutions in 2014. In this study, we examine how cohort-based passing rates in college-level English and math courses changed at different colleges for pre- and post-policy period and explore what institutional characteristics were related with various…

Under Florida's developmental education (DE) reform since 2014, recent public high school graduates and active-duty military personnel became exempt from DE and traditional placement tests. The legislation also required colleges to provide accelerated instruction strategies for students remaining in DE and offer enhanced advising and support…

As American teacher educators and teachers are being roiled by restrictive legislation around critical race theory and divisive concepts in some states, our investigation explored the impact of critical communities of practice (CoP) on redesigning and teaching introduction to education courses with a transformative lens. This manuscript details…

The purpose of this paper is to not analyze how effective or ineffective Senate Bill 1720 has been since its implementation five years ago; rather, the paper's guiding goal is to closely examine a report recently published in February 2019 by The Center for Postsecondary Success (CPS) at Florida State University, claiming SB 1720 a success. In the…

In the wake of the racial reckoning created by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, several states have enacted multiple anti-equity educational measures. Florida is central in this discussion as it leads the US policymaking with 23 bills introduced and passed into law. Further, Florida's particular constellation of educational reforms has…

Anti-LGBTQ+ school legislation has proliferated across the United States in recent years, with potential consequences for both students and school counselors. Florida's controversial 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act offers one such example. In this descriptive, phenomenological, qualitative study, we examined the experiences of 10 Florida…

Purpose: The purpose of this review article is to conduct a critical analysis of state-level policies focusing on the provision of speech-language therapy and special education to children and youth who are racialized emergent bilinguals (REBs) suspected or labeled as dis/abled. Method: We analyzed the state-level policies focusing on…