In this article, Arnold Shober asserts that despite the special challenges of public governance, state boards can effectively serve as beacons of policy. An effective board is driven by effective members whatever its structure, and effective members are committed to a shared agenda and the larger project of providing direction for a state's…

In this article, the authors propose a department-level curricular committee structure, called Strand Committees, as a mechanism to facilitate oversight and enact significant change to policies and practices in specific courses. The primary goal of the Strand Committees is improving both student success and instruction while upholding a high…

While U.S. voters delivered a significant change in the 2024 federal elections, they opted for steady leadership at the state level. No state board of education shifted in partisan control, and only five seats saw a shift in political party out of 27 races that were contested in the general election. This policy update looks at the results of…

This contribution takes a critical perspective on digital school performance platforms (SPP), which today play a key role in US state education monitoring and accountability. Using examples from two different US state education agencies, I provide an analytical disentanglement of some key dimensions of such platforms' enactment and materiality. I…

The "Forum Guide to Data Governance" highlights how data governance programs benefit education agencies and provide timely and useful best practices, examples, and resources for agencies implementing or updating their data governance programs. This resource is intended to address the needs of federal, state, and local agencies related…

California's education policy agenda, in particular the near-simultaneous implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), has created challenges and opportunities for the state. Coming on the heels of the Great Recession of 2008, these enormous shifts--the demands for substantially new teaching…

Higher education governance today is a complex endeavor that demands dynamic, creative, and thoughtful communication, actions, and leadership. Given the continually diminishing level of state funding for higher education, leaders at all levels should be equipped to generate and lobby for funds internally (within their university) and externally…

The Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange (MLDE) facilitates data sharing between states from K-12 education, higher education, and labor agencies. Its goal is to provide practitioners, policymakers, and researchers with a comprehensive data source to understand educational and career trajectories, including how these trajectories can cross state…

This publication highlights how state leaders tackle data interoperability with the emergence of data standards for student information, assessment, digital content, and other educational applications. While states are at various maturity levels for interoperability, each state shares goals for interoperability, the drivers for those goals,…

The Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes' (CEELO) mission is to strengthen the capacity of State Education Agencies and state Early Learning Agencies to lead sustained improvements in early learning opportunities and outcomes. These agencies have authority to establish and implement policies, administer funding and provide oversight for…

This article focuses on coordination between governance actors in higher education. The object of the study is a department at a public university, seen as a multi-project environment. The purpose of this article is to illustrate and analyze project governance as a tool that allows departmental management to coordinate with the authorities, the…

When students, parents, educators, and partners have the right information to make decisions, students excel. By forming research partnerships, state education agencies (SEAs), policymakers, practitioners, and education researchers at universities and other research institutes can work together to use research to provide the best education…

This introduction to the discipline of education enterprise architecture, or EEA, explains briefly the needs that EEA addresses, its benefits, components and the essential elements of its governance and management. At its core, education enterprise architecture is the bridge connecting the business/ program side of the organization and information…

This case was developed for use in a learning-centered course with a focus on administrative leadership and ethical behavior. This case describes the experience of a new faculty member at Saint Ambrose University, as she discovers a wide range of ethical and management problems in her department. The case unfolds as we track her efforts to deal…

This case describes the implementation of a fraud and corruption control policy initiative within the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (the Department) in Australia. The policy initiative was administered and carried out by a small team of fraud control officials, including the author of this article, in the…