The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread closures of early care and education (ECE) facilities that negatively impacted children's socioemotional, behavioral, and academic development. Policies permitting child care centers to remain open by obtaining waivers from closure directives involved varying levels of administrative burden. This study…

Since 2017, hostile anti-LGBTQ+ educational bills rapidly expanded. Using traditional and critical policy analysis across three Midwestern states, we examine (1) whether state and local policymakers (n = 60) adopted trans-inclusive protections aligned with the 2017 federal "Whitaker" ruling, (2) the spread and scope of state and local…

The reporting of students' Learning Skills on the Ontario provincial report card provides educators and families with insight into students' work habits. However, the evaluation process is highly subjective. This study explores teachers' perceptions around student learning across demographic and institutional factors. This exploratory study is the…

This paper on the political sociology of school choice policies has been written as a supplement to the essays in the 2020 Politics of Education Association Yearbook and locates them in cognate literatures. In addition, the papers are situated against the changing political and global contexts of such policies, as global pressures, discourses, and…

This article presents the findings of research focused on schools' responses to competitive environments. Using the Chilean education market as a case study, the article analyzes not only the responses developed by schools in different domains in the face of competitive incentives but also their diversity, as well as motivations, rationalities,…

Educational public-private partnerships (EPPP) have been widely implemented in the Philippines, primarily through the Education Service Contracting (ESC) voucher. Yet, the effects of this voucher on privatization of education, school choice, and competition dynamics remain largely understudied. This article addresses this gap through an…

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school…

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…

Recent efforts prohibiting race-related diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have informed localized public pushback narrating anti-equity campaigns. Emerging research and media accounts have largely focused on adults engaged with or against these efforts, with less attention on youth and their perceptions of these campaigns. To center…

Multiple studies have shown the potential for school choice policies to benefit middle-class families, often to the detriment of lower income students in the same district. Yet, there is limited research examining the role of policies in promoting inequality by encouraging exclusionary behaviors. In this article, we utilize the concept of…

Through an ethnographic case study within one struggling Afrocentric public charter school in the Mid-Atlantic from 2009 to 2011, I show how broader neoliberal reforms and an incomplete attempt at Afrocentric education combined to redefine Blackness as poverty, danger, and failure through the co-optation of school-based practices. Using a Critical…

Institutional theory, an important research tradition in analysis of schooling, has examined the development of mass schooling in the United States and worldwide. But research in this tradition has given little attention to the internal working of mass school systems, to problems of inequality and the quality of instruction, or to relating those…

States' increasing involvement in educational policy making can play a significant role in how school districts provide equitable educational opportunities. Guided by critical policy analysis, the purpose of this article is to examine state-level policy pertaining to English learners (ELs) from district-level perspectives. Based on interview and…

More historically White institutions of higher education are compelled to respond, in some way, to increased activism and awareness of continued legacies of racism and racial crises on campuses. The author suggests that how schools wrestle with their legacies of racism and/or respond to student demands to right racial wrongs on campus might be…

This study illustrates a method for evaluating the accuracy of performance metrics and identifies potential institutional and student attributes that may increase the likelihood of classification errors. Longitudinal data were obtained from the Integrated Postsecondary Eduation Data System for public 4-year institutions (N = 558) to evaluate…