Public presentations of research about charter schools have been politicized, polarized, and personalized, fueling cynicism about whether research can generate objective knowledge and promote the collective good. This article draws two distinctions: between politics as a corrupting force and politics as a healthy and necessary component of…

This article places policy development in the context of progressive social movements. It describes how social movements develop, and delineates some of the accomplishments of such contestation in U.S. history as well as in changes of education policy. The article closes by considering the possibilities and challenges of current social movement…

Employing the Advocacy Coalition Framework to ground the analysis, this article begins with an historical overview of the US Protestant Right and its involvement with the politics of public schooling. It then moves to a discussion of a few current legal and policy issues (intelligent design, evolution, the Kansas state board of education, school…

This study analyzes parent and professional organizations' effectiveness in national special education policy from 1975 to the present. Of specific interest are the relationships between groups' policy victories, how groups construct their political messages, and organizational characteristics. The research is significant in that it is one of the…

This article develops a framework, drawn from earlier work by education scholars, as well as broader theoretical insights on advocacy and policymaking developed by political scientists, for thinking about education politics in the post-No Child Left Behind era. The authors use this framework to examine the evolution of the national education…

This article provides documentation of the current military presence in U.S. secondary schools and groups that have mobilized to monitor or oppose this presence. This documentation provides the background for a narrative of a multiple-year effort the author engaged in to promote academic freedom for teachers and students and to provide high school…

This article summarizes and evaluates two "Off-the-Shelf" school finance reforms that gained then waned in popularity over the past several years. The 65 percent solution claims that requiring all public school districts to allocate 65 cents of every education dollar "to the classroom" would drive substantial additional resources to children…

Philanthropists have long funded a wide range of educational research, practice, and policy initiatives, primarily through namesake foundations. Some observers have criticized these efforts as doing little to change the status quo in education and have called for more aggressive action on the part of this sector. Out of this critique has emerged a…

This study explores the ways that state high school testing policies shape college opportunity among students attending 15 high schools in five states. The authors use multiple descriptive case studies to explore how testing policies influence key predictors of college enrollment (e.g., high school graduation, academic preparation, knowledge, and…

Although theorists and policy makers agree that schooling should be democratic, what this exactly means often varies. This article establishes a conceptual model for analyzing education policy in democratic societies, based on the key concepts of equality, diversity, participation, choice, and cohesion. The model facilitates the design,…

Courts hearing school finance reform cases have recently begun to consider several issues related to standards-based accountability policies. This convergence of school finance reform litigation and standards-based accountability policies represents a chance for the courts to reallocate decision-making authority for each type of reform across the…

This study uses data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 to test a conceptual model that integrates aspects of sociological and econometric frameworks into a traditional status attainment model for educational aspirations. Using descriptive and logistic analyses, this study advanced understanding of the patterns and stability of…

In this study, the author explores elementary mathematics instruction in the context of standards-based reform and special education policy. Based on observation of inclusive classrooms and interviews with 12 teachers, the author finds that instructional practice was only somewhat consistent with the policy messages to include students with…

People live in a time where neoliberal positions, with their assumption that private is good and public is bad, are dominant. Yet, as the author and others have demonstrated, such positions consistently privilege particular and identifiable classed and raced groups. This is not accidental. Society, like many others throughout the world, is…

Gender-based bullying is the most common form of violence that students encounter in U.S. public schools. Several large-scale surveys reveal its consequences for students. Fewer studies examine how school staff members make sense of and respond to such violence. The authors address this knowledge gap by presenting analyses of interviews conducted…