This article examines the relation between education, voting and representation, and, in particular, the argument that more highly educated people should have more votes, as they should be better at judging important political decisions. In the past this issue attracted the attention of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Newman and Mill. In…

We consider the statistical inference for noisy incomplete binary (or 1-bit) matrix. Despite the importance of uncertainty quantification to matrix completion, most of the categorical matrix completion literature focuses on point estimation and prediction. This paper moves one step further toward the statistical inference for binary matrix…

This study investigates how individual states raise revenue to pay for elementary-secondary education spending following school finance reforms (SFRs). We identify states that increased and sustained education expenditures after reform, search for legislative statutes that appropriated more education spending, and assess how policymakers funded…

Background: Understanding how policymakers define research and differentiate it from other sources of data is critical for scientists to improve how they conduct and communicate research to policy audiences. Yet, few studies have explicitly asked policymakers -- particularly state legislators in the USA -- how they define research evidence.…

Latinxs, especially Latino males, have lower college completion rates, but studies find that community cultural wealth is prominent in the narratives of those who succeed in higher education. By focusing on current students or recent graduates, the literature has not examined how a college completion experience aided by community cultural wealth…

This article seeks to analyse how epistemic work (Alasuutari, 2018; Alasuutari and Qadir, 2019) in Portuguese parliamentary education debates develops through externalisation to world situations (Schriewer, 1990) whose references are used as epistemic capital (Alasuutari, 2018). The study explores debates occurring during Legislature X…

In this case study, I draw attention to key Nevada Latina/o legislators' policy ways of knowing and their higher education policy priorities. A focus on the policy actors uncovered structural, racial, and cultural assumptions in policy-making often absent in the exclusive analysis of policy interventions. Their policy ways of knowing were shaped…

In this article, we examine the extent to which women teachers ran for state legislative office in 2018, where they won, and the degree to which they contributed to the surge of women representatives elected in state legislatures around the country. We engaged in a comprehensive effort to collect information on all of the teacher candidates who…

Background: Elected members of the US Congress rely on staff, including fellows with scientific and engineering expertise, to find and interpret information for use in policymaking. Factors that impede, or facilitate, the communication of scientific information within the institution thus can play a critical role in legislative capacity, but there…

Driving across tracts of new-home development in El Paso, Texas, one can't miss the signs of charter-school momentum. Charter-school enrollment has been growing in Texas for years, but in many localities and even at the state level, charter schools had until recently encountered harsher treatment from policymakers than what advocates have…

Drawing on intersectionality and representational identity theory, this article centers Black women legislators' collective and individual experiences to examine how their experiences shape their policy ways of knowing and education policy priorities. The women were guided by their own lived experiences of witnessing unequal educational…

This paper explores the movement of the New York City Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT) for "equal pay for equal work" in teaching salaries, which it won in 1911. The IAWT's success sheds light on the possibilities and limits of women teachers advocating for change within a feminized profession. Leading the movement were…

Drawing on longitudinal data of state K--12 education policymaker demographics, we examine education policymaking body diversity over time, and across states and institutional structures. Though dominated by white businessmen, females and professional educators increased their presence at the education policymaking table. There was little movement…

Political parties are widely recognised as indispensable actors in democratic systems. One way to illustrate the actions and role of political parties is to explicate various party functions that may be carried out in a political system. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationships between the organisation of party education and five…

Since the early 1990's funding K-12 public education in Oklahoma has faced trials and tribulations. The purpose of this study was to understand, through the lens of Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), factors that elected educators have experienced that have influenced their ability and their motivation to affect increased funding for education…