How do spatial proximity, policy networks, and temporal dynamics interact to shape education policy diffusion across the American states and have these channels of influence changed over time? This study introduces an integrated framework combining spatial-X (SLX) estimation, exogenously constructed policy-pathway network exposure, and discrete-time survival models with policy-level random intercepts to decompose the relative contributions of geographic, relational, and temporal channels. Drawing on 10 education policies from the State Policy Innovation and Diffusion (SPID) database (1896–2017), with the policy-pathway network constructed from 714 non-education SPID policies to address within-domain endogeneity concerns, the analysis finds that geographic proximity and network exposure each predict adoption, although their relative importance has shifted across historical periods. For policies whose diffusion windows opened before 1970, geographic proximity is the dominant detectable channel; for policies opening after 1970, network exposure displaces geography. Spatial effects are detectable for K-12 policies but not for higher-education reforms, where statistical power is limited. A complementary spatial Durbin model on rapid-diffusion versus sequential-diffusion subsamples shows that contemporaneous (SAR) determination dominates for policies that diffuse in fewer than seven years, while temporally lagged (SLX) determination dominates for sequential-diffusion policies. A SPID-wide replication on 635 policies and 17,628 adoption events confirms both spatial signals across the broader policy landscape. These findings reveal how the institutional infrastructure connecting American states has evolved from geography-mediated to network-mediated channels, with implications for diffusion theory, methodological practice, and intergovernmental policy coordination.

This article presents a DuBosian approach to civic education: one that advocates for content that is racially inclusive and addresses political activism; centers conversations about politics; and ensures that K-12 educators reflect the diversity of their students. I argue that this approach provides a useful framework for classroom practices that can equip young people with the capacity needed to navigate and transform a democratic system defined by persistent racial inequality. I also assess whether there is public support for such an approach using a national sample of Americans. I find that a majority of respondents across racial, ethnic, and partisan lines, including many parents, support central tenets of a DuBoisian approach to civic education. By emphasizing the tangible pedagogical techniques associated with a DuBosian approach to civic education, it may be possible to sidestep the ambiguity and polarization of curriculum debates and reengage in the nuances of civic education policymaking.

Hybrid and microschools have expanded rapidly in the United States. These models do not fit neatly within existing governance categories, raising questions about how authority, accountability, and decision-making are organised in American education. This paper applies Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework, widely used in natural resource and infrastructure governance but rarely applied to education, to compare institutional arrangements in conventional public schools and hybrid schools, where education is co-produced by families and providers. The comparison generates five propositions about how differences in physical arrangements, actors, rule systems, action situations, and accountability mechanisms shape governance outcomes. Hybrid schools exhibit characteristics of polycentric governance that conventional schools largely lack. A section on economic implications examines demand, supply, and information-cost dynamics. The paper concludes that Ostrom’s framework reframes education reform not as a contest between markets and governments but as an evolving search for effective rule systems in a polycentric public economy.

This article applies Critical School Finance theory to analyze the $543.9 billion in U.S. school district debt as a mechanism of racialized wealth extraction. Using the framework’s five core concepts—dispossession, kleptocracy, extraction/super-expropriation, racial capitalism, and inequality—we examine how debt systematically transfers educational resources from predominantly Black, Latino, and low-income students to financial institutions and bondholders. Case studies of Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA reveal how districts serving students of color carry disproportionate debt burdens, divert billions from instruction to debt service, and experience compounding educational disadvantages. We argue that school debt is not neutral fiscal management but represents organized theft that reproduces racial inequality across generations, demanding transformative rather than incremental reform.

In the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), its majority held that “no single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control.” The court’s opinion overturned US District Court judge Stephen Roth’s order for metropolitan desegregation to remedy segregation in Detroit. Histories of the Milliken decision have often narrated its meaning and consequence through metropolitan histories of segregation, but the legal issue at the heart of Judge Roth’s holding and the court’s decision to overturn it concerned the state’s educational authority and whether state constitutional violations enabled more expansive remedies. This article retraces the policy and legal history of state power in producing segregation and inequality before and after the Milliken decision. It illustrates how the Supreme Court’s reasoning produced a political situation in which State policymakers could uphold segregation and inequality without consequence when isolating Detroit’s schools for intervention.

While the abolition of secondary school fees has expanded educational access across low-income countries, empirical research has focused predominantly on student outcomes and institutional or elite perspectives, overlooking how ordinary citizens perceive such reforms or the factors shaping those perceptions. This gap is especially salient in Ghana, where the Free SHS policy, arguably the most comprehensive in Sub-Saharan Africa, is both nationally lauded and politically contested. Drawing on policy feedback theory and deservingness heuristics, this article explores how Ghanaians interpret the policy’s goals, trade-offs, and implementation using a nationally representative sample of 1915 respondents. Latent Class Analysis reveals five classes, from Universal Access Champions down to Ambivalent Observers. A follow-up multinomial logistic regression shows that partisanship, education, civic engagement, and economic outlook significantly predict class membership. These findings highlight that sustaining support for large-scale reforms requires not just expanded access, but also public trust in their fairness and responsiveness.

Once a focus of political science, interest group studies lost prominence before a resurgence over the past 25 years. Today, scholars around the globe are paying more attention to interest groups, and studies of interest group politics in the American states are leading the way due to uniquely transparent disclosure regulations for lobbyists and institutional variation across state governments. This review charts the theoretical and methodological contributions that fueled this evolution and highlights lessons to be gleaned from contemporary American state scholarship. Findings include how structural power is a source of leverage for lobbyists, how interest groups venue shop within a state government from the legislature to bureaucracy and even elected agencies, and how sometimes the enactment of legislation is only the beginning of group influence.

Our thesis is that the degree of permissible interaction between government and religion and its policy implications is most strikingly documented in the educational arena. To support our claim, we make three arguments: (1) by the early 1970s, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and other states were experimenting with accommodationist policies in education that neither increased religious divisiveness nor denied religious freedom. These policy experiments contributed to the Supreme Court’s new understanding of religious accommodation under the First Amendment; (2) beginning in the late 1970s, a scholarly reappraisal of the establishment clause—based on a close reading of the debates over the First Amendment in Congress and the states—was demonstrating that reasonable governmental accommodations, particularly in education, would not violate the establishment clause; and (3) that periodizing the establishment clause’s history, by focusing on state-level innovations and scholarly reinterpretations, enhances the understanding of the policy developments of the First Amendment, particularly in the educational field.

This article introduces a framework for systematically evaluating and comparing language rights across national contexts. We develop an index to assess the range of language freedoms, focusing on areas such as government services, education, healthcare, and media. The index compiles multiple variables into a single indicator, offering a concise measure of linguistic freedom. Our analysis shows that larger language communities typically enjoy more language rights, though this relationship is influenced by civil liberties. We argue that this index is both descriptive and normative, providing a tool for comparing language policy and advocating for linguistic justice.

In this article, we argue that the current linguistic and educational policies affecting school-age US children whose native language is American Sign Language (ASL) should be changed. Concretely, we demonstrate that ASL-English bilinguals should be eligible for classification as English Learners (EL). While this identification should remain optional in order to be responsive to individual differences and preferences, we argue that identification can result in increased educational services and access to appropriately targeted instructional support. We offer concrete programmatic and curricular solutions and articulate other consequences affecting various fields, including language policy.

Comparative research documents substantial education- and income-based class gaps in parent spending on children’s education, with important repercussions for the perpetuation of intergenerational (dis)advantage. Spurred by higher levels of income inequality and associated economic transformations, some speculate these gaps may have widened, as parents feel intensified pressure to best position their children in increasingly competitive labour markets. We examine the size and evolution—over time and in response to higher inequality—of these class gaps in the Canadian provinces, a context where we propose competitive pressures may be muted by the country’s relatively unstratified post-secondary education system. Exploiting provincial and temporal variation in Statistics Canada’s Survey of Household Spending (2006–2019), we show that more highly educated parents, and to a lesser extent high-income ones, place distinct emphasis on education spending. However, we find limited evidence of changes in these spending patterns in response to income inequality or over time.

Public education systems and the incidence of child labor have historically been intertwined with both ultimately impacting labor market outcomes and the experience of work. This paper analyzes a suite of interrelated policies in the United States (some enacted, some proposed) that will have the ultimate effect of increasing the presence of minors in the workforce. We explore the impacts of this ultimate result for both industrial-organizational (I-O) research and practice, focusing on (a) increased underemployment and (b) increased workplace accidents, injuries and hazards in the workplace as clear points for necessary research and practice. Further, we highlight the need for I-O psychologists to become more adept at conducting research and practice with minors.

This paper discusses the importance of incorporating personal assistance into interventions aimed at improving long-term education and labor market success. While existing research demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of low-touch behavioral nudges, this paper argues that the dynamic nature of human capital accumulation requires sustained habits over time. To foster better habits, social connections are critical for encouraging enduring effort and intrinsic motivation. The paper links the role of personal assistance to economic theories of human capital investment and decision-making, and showcases examples from various stages of skill accumulation, including early childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in which interventions that incorporate personal assistance substantially out-perform less intensive nudges. We underscore the importance of interactive support, guidance, and motivation in facilitating significant progress and explore the challenges associated with implementing cost-effective policies to provide such assistance.

The American K12 education system has long been seen as centralized and rigid. The 1990s saw the emergence of several changes, which arguably pushed it in a potentially more polycentric, localized direction. Many school choice policies have developed since then, and a large amount of research has been conducted on these trends in American education since 1991. Just prior to these changes, in 1991, Davis and Ostrom published ‘A Public Economy Approach to Education: Choice and Co-Production’. That work sought to examine the extent of co-production in American schools to that time, and the extent to which the system was polycentric. This paper seeks to use Davis & Ostrom’s framing and to update their work in the current context. U.S. education policy has generally become more decentralized during this time, but not consistently. This paper also finds that U.S. education policy and practice has in fact developed along several of the lines Davis & Ostrom predicted.

The COVID-19 pandemic confronted policymakers with extraordinary uncertainty and pressure to make and justify urgent decisions. Among the tools used to navigate this complex context, policy narratives played a key role in shaping how problems and solutions were publicly framed. Through qualitative coding and process tracing, this article examines how policy narratives shaped school policies in Italy during the crisis, with a focus on the effectiveness of rhetorical strategies in securing preferred outputs. Using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), the study analyzes public statements by key governmental actors and compares their narrative strategies with the decisions ultimately implemented. The findings show that non-rhetorical strategies predominated and were more effective than rhetorical ones. Notably, the only instance in which the adopted policy diverged from the preferred one occurred when rhetorical strategies prevailed. The analysis suggests that, in times of crisis, narrative effectiveness depends less on rhetorical appeal and more on alignment with the crisis trajectory, consistency with scientific advice, and the narrator's reputation. The article advances a contextualized model of narrative effectiveness, integrating these factors into the NPF to better explain narrative success and failure in crisis policymaking.