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…

For decades, Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) has blatantly disregarded and ostracized Black caregivers and community members who have attempted to address concerns about the educational experience of Black students. The only moderately successful strategy was political activism led by Dr. Barbara Sizemore in the 1970s to secure a board majority,…

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…

The Innovation Schools Act of 2008, § 22-32.5-102, et seq. C.R.S., was designed to provide a pathway for schools and districts to develop and implement innovative practices in a wide variety of areas and contexts to improve student outcomes. The Act provides a formal process that allows schools or groups of schools to make requests to their local…

The problem explored in this study was that the state education agency recommended school board members of low-performing school districts participate in a governance training called student outcomes governance to address student achievement, yet no data suggested the training changed school board members' understanding of how to create policies…

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…

Most states claim academic rigor and career readiness as goals for all their students. But as school systems continue tracking students into higher or lower levels of academic coursework and into career and technical courses that lack rigorous, real-world assignments, they reflect an apparent underlying belief that their students' abilities are…

By now, members of state boards of education will have heard the dire statistics about the rise in students' mental health struggles, which were exacerbated by exposure to added traumatic events during the pandemic. When they are prepared to do so, educators play an important role in helping these students. In this article, the authors discuss how…

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…

This study highlights the Community Schools (CS) implementation experience of five rural Vermont schools. Principals and CS coordinators participating in a state-funded program aimed at CS establishment were interviewed to understand better their experience with implementing a school/district-wide policy and reform effort. Findings suggest several…

In this paper we match originally collected survey data from school board members in the state of Michigan with hard measures of school district outcomes to test two hypotheses regarding the relationship between strategic planning prioritization and organizational performance. We find that school board members who place a higher priority on…