Due to advances in medical treatments, students with terminal illnesses are more likely to attend public schools, increasing the possibility that they may die on school property. However, educational health plans often fail to consider end-of-life care decisions. In the absence of federal or state statutes, school boards are left to navigate the…

The impact of the pandemic and the political climate positioned school boards to advocate and leverage support and resources to inform and influence state education policy targeting the opportunity gap. This study assessed school board members' engagement levels with education policy and determined individual, institutional, and contextual factors…

Background: What is the role of state legislatures in improving public education? Is it to provide funding and standards for student outcomes and then step aside? Or should legislatures and state education agencies also govern how districts educate students? In practice, states hold school districts accountable for academic achievement while also…

Neoliberal discourse dominated education policy for decades and fueled reform movements with lasting effects. Through a critical lens this qualitative case study explored policy direction, the influences that shaped multiple years of reform initiatives and the impact of these changes in one Canadian province. Data sources including policy…

School boards have a central position in educational governance. They have to guarantee quality, monitor results and intervene if needed. In this article we report the results of a systematic literature review meant to identify what school boards do to contribute to educational quality. After five steps of literature selection and refinement, our…

This article examines the long-overlooked governmental body, the local community college governing board, through the lens of descriptive representation, to assess what variables are associated with minority representation. Higher education governing boards have long lacked diversity, let alone any type of proportional representation, but an…

School-based mental health professionals, including school psychologists, counselors, and social workers are critical to appropriate mental health services to youth in schools. However, the vast majority of states are chronically underserved by these professionals, despite policies that attempt to rectify the shortages. In this paper, we document…

The Title I and Title II-A programs of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provide funds meant to help schools and districts better serve low-income students and improve teacher and principal quality. The law's latest update, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), was passed in 2015 and provides more flexibility to states on some…

All students have the right to be safe at school. Regulations mandate that schools must establish procedures to ensure the safety of all students during emergency situations. Twenty years ago, a Midwestern school district created Individualized Emergency Evacuation Plans (IEEPs) to address unique safety needs of students with disabilities. A mixed…

Black community members often express frustrations with engagement within school board meetings through continuous advocacy for systemic change. While scholarship has identified the racial tensions between Black community members and school board members, few studies have explored how school board meeting spaces and their practices influence Black…

This article examines how recent policy reforms in Nova Scotia, Canada, encouraged and constrained distributed leadership in the provincial public education system. The study found the language of newly enacted legislation and policies encouraged distributed leadership by endorsing collaborative team processes for school improvement and special…

Collaborative problem-solving research approaches have the potential to support improvement in educational policy and practice beyond instruction, by facilitating the development of a shared understanding of complex problems and creating social structures where district, community, and research partners can work together to solve them. This study…

Despite a growing recognition of the significance of student transportation for promoting equitable school choice, to date, there has been limited understanding of the implementation of school transportation policies, particularly in choice-heavy settings. Moreover, little is known about the challenges associated with managing student…

We survey 137 charter school administrators and 129 board members and find that U.S. charter school internal controls are perceived to be relatively strong overall. However, board independence, board communication of internal control responsibilities to school personnel, lines of communication between the board and school personnel, and reporting…

District and school leaders face the challenge of designing and implementing supports for immigrant newcomers who have recently arrived in the US, speak little English, and are unfamiliar with the US school system. This study draws on 117 interviews with educators in six purposefully-sampled school districts across the country to examine the…