Mel Ainscow has recently written an interesting and important article concerning a challenging aspect of inclusive education, namely how to practically implement the ambitious ideal of inclusion in schools, where inclusion refers to making basic education of a high quality available to all learners by identifying barriers to access to educational…

Shantel Meek of the Children's Equity Project talks with Kappan about the challenges facing early childhood education. These include the splintered nature of the system, a lack of funding, and the low status and pay afforded to the early childhood workforce. Although early care programs, such as Head Start, have helped children in poverty,…

Sara Goldrick-Rab is the Founding Director of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice and Professor of Sociology & Medicine at Temple University. She is the recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation's Faculty Scholars Award and the American Educational Research Association's Early Career Award, and in 2016 POLITICO named her one…

This opinion piece explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on exposing educational inequity. The historically racist and discriminatory practices related to both academic instruction and discipline are long-standing in the history of American education, but have been brought to the attention of White, middle-class America as a result of the…

Two advocates of grading reform, Joe Feldman and Douglas Reeves, answer questions about how grading practices and policies could--or should--be influenced by the current pandemic, and by U.S. schools' switch to distance learning. They weigh in on how the K-12 grading landscape will differ this fall--with likely more clarity about learning gaps and…

The COVID-19 pandemic brings to the fore strengths and weaknesses in many public policies, including higher education. There are at least three separate but related areas where institutions of higher learning have been stressed by COVID-19: financing, issues related to the logistics of learning, and inequality. These problems are especially…

Writing practitioners, researchers, and scholars are at a juncture where foundational assumptions about the teaching of writing, its place in higher education, and its ability to help foster a truly inclusive democratic society are increasingly contested. Trust in literacy has been eroded over the past decades, coming to an acute crisis in the…

This position statement addresses the International Literacy Association's (ILA) advocacy for the right to excellent literacy instruction for children worldwide, which builds on the 10 principles in ILA's Children's Rights to Read campaign: ensuring that every child, everywhere, has access to the education, opportunities, and resources needed to…

The Seal of Biliteracy is a grass-roots language policy initiative that is sweeping across the United States. An award affixed to high school graduates' transcripts and diplomas, the overarching purpose of the policy is to promote and foster students' bilingualism and biliteracy in K-12 schools. Initiated in California in 2011, the policy has been…

This article describes the Division of Career Development and Transition's (DCDT) position regarding Career Technical Education (CTE) and provides recommendations regarding more intense collaboration to improve access to and persistence in CTE for students with disabilities. Professional groups, such as the DCDT and the Association for Career and…

Policies are typically regarded as the principles, priorities, rules, and/or guidelines that are issued by an organization to achieve, make progress toward, or rally others around certain goals. Policies may have the following characteristics: (1) Association with government agencies within countries; (2) Legal status; (3) Association with…

As Bae (2018) suggests, one way to fill gaps between a holistic view of student learning and accountability policy implementation is to use multiple measures that reflect diverse perspectives of learning. The purpose of this commentary is to provide a discussion of issues, which need to be considered in order to achieve the desired outcomes of…

Miguel A. Cardona, the former commissioner of education in Connecticut, became the U.S. Secretary of Education on March 2, 2021, taking office in the midst of an historic pandemic that had profoundly reshaped the nation's schools. In his initial months on the job, Cardona- also a one-time public school teacher and principal--has focused closely on…

A focus on faculty professional learning, given the challenges that California community colleges and students face, must remain a high priority and continue to evolve. The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) has long been an advocate for the development of robust professional development policies as part of senate purview…

This article reflects on the epistemological steamrolling that the 2021 Ofsted Curriculum Research Review (OCRR) accomplishes: in part, by the positioning of the problem and solution through highly selective cherry-picking (omitting key causal factors); in part, through the discursive move of acknowledging complexity before offering simple and…