Hispanic-Serving Institutions' (HSIs) diversification and Title V's anemic funding present a ripe condition for inequity. Hence, I interviewed 29 institutional actors across 17 HSIs to understand how they view their competitiveness for these grants and sources of inequity of this program. I identified four themes, demonstrating that an HSI's…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) reverses a trend toward centralization of education policy and instead provides greater authority to the states. This study explores states' interpretation and early implementation of ESSA's equity-related provisions. Using a qualitative case study approach, we find wide variation in the design and…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) offers states increased flexibility in how they identify, rank, label, and support underperforming schools. Initial reviews of state ESSA plans, however, suggest that identification and labeling policies have remained relatively unchanged. In this study, we analyze all state ESSA plans to systematically…

The paradigm of test-based accountability has been a dominant force for decades, yet some argue that we have recently witnessed a dramatic change in the key beliefs influencing educational policy. To understand the extent of this transformation, we investigated the policy narrative supporting the adoption of a multiple measure accountability…

This article provides an overview of recent changes to state-level dyslexia legislation. It begins by applying a variant of Kingdon's multiple streams approach to explain how the dyslexia education "policy window" came to be opened. The article then describes the most likely effects and side effects of the new laws. Likely short-term…

To achieve Higher Education Act Title V funding goals, policymakers must reconsider approaches, respond to Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) diversity, and prioritize servingness. This study investigated HSI heterogeneity across traditional performance metrics and student-engagement indicators using data sources previously only examined…

This qualitative case study examines how board members make sense of federal accountability policies and how their sensemaking shapes their use of assessment data as a policy instrument. Deviating from previous work on practitioner sensemaking, the participants' interpretations of assessments did not align with their ensuing use of the data.…

Although current and former English Learner (EL) or "ever-EL" students comprise one of the fastest-growing K-12 populations, we still know relatively little about the factors that influence their college-going. Using Perna's seminal college-going model as a launching point, we propose a policy-driven empirical approach to explore how…

As a result of patchwork policies, early childhood education (ECE) providers combine funding from multiple sources, known as blended funding. However, little is known about the consequences of blended funding for policy goals. We use national ECE provider data to identify the prevalence of blended funding models, and detailed state quality rating…

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a scientifically validated framework that has been included in policy like the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 and the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008. However, studies have pointed out the variability in definitions and implementation surrounding UDL. In order to clarify this conversation,…

The purpose of this study is to examine changes in teachers' perception of their work during key periods of the accountability and assessment policy movement in the United States. We utilize a teacher perception of deprofessionalization and demoralization framework operationalized using the restricted Schools and Staffing Surveys data sets from…

Decades after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling banned mandatory race-based separation of students to different schools, school segregation, and inequality in the United States are rapidly increasing. In this research synthesis, I propose a model for explaining how segregation and inequality are formed in urban and suburban school systems and…

This study sought to understand how state-level policies inform and promote the implementation of restorative justice in education (RJE). A content analysis of 60 laws revealed that definitions, structures, and supports varied greatly, causing us to question whether policies support a systematic implementation of RJE and how policies can prevent…

This article draws from primary and secondary historical sources such as public policy documents, speeches, and media reports to trace attempts made by the Kentucky legislature to ban controversial topics in public school curriculum--evolution in 1922 and critical race theory in 2022. Kingdon's multiple streams framework (MSF) serves as the model…

Reform of school zero tolerance discipline policies is complicated by a lack of systematic evidence on the prevalence and characteristics of such policies. Through document analysis, this study compares explicit zero tolerance laws/policies and mandatory expulsion laws/policies across the domains of federal law, state law, district policy, and…