Increasingly, governments report on public service quality, which has the potential to inform evaluations of performance that underlie voters’ opinions and behaviors. We argue these policies have important effects that go beyond informing voters. Specifically, we contend that the format in which policymakers choose to report information will steer the direction of opinion by exacerbating or mitigating biases in information processing. Using the case of school accountability systems in the United States and a variety of experimental and observational approaches, we find that letter grade systems for rating public school performance, as opposed to other reporting formats, exacerbate negativity bias. Public opinion proves more responsive to negative information than to positive information in letter grade systems than in alternate formats. Policymakers, then, do not simply inform public opinion; rather, their decisions about how to present information shape the interpretations that voters ultimately draw from the information provided.

This paper examines the notion of wilding pedagogy and its potential for comprehensive transformation through educational policy. This paper argues that given current unsustainable human practices, significant changes can be achieved by aligning education and policy. This paper begins by defining wilding pedagogies and providing an overview of Botswana’s background and prospects. It contends that Botswana has the potential to enhance the quality of education by promoting active and transformative learning experiences. Furthermore, this policy can lead to improved academic performance by acknowledging cultural linkages, honouring land, returning to a holistic approach aligned with the principles of the wild in education.

We examine the influence of national politics and changing racial demographics on school board elections. We identify the districts where candidates campaigned on Critical Race Theory, COVID response, or parent control/transparency (what we call “conflict elections”) and examine two related questions. First, what characteristics define school districts that had elections involving these issues? Second, in the places that had conflict elections, how frequently did “conflict candidates” win, and what factors influenced their odds of winning? Utilizing a unique dataset of all school board elections in Wisconsin in 2022, we find that Republican presidential vote share is positively related to both the probability that a school district had a conflict election and that a conflict candidate won. We also find that in communities where the white population declined between 2010 and 2020, there was a higher likelihood that a conflict candidate won compared to communities where the size of the white population grew. Overall, our analysis confirms that school board elections are increasingly mirroring nationalized trends in other elections.

How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning field to show that historians of school finance have the potential to make racial dispossession a central tenet of their analyses. First, I lay out a longer timeline for the periodization of school finance history than most of the previous scholarship has adopted to recast school funding inequality within the racialized context of land and capital dispossession. Second, I situate school finance more explicitly in US political history, showing how the study of school funding policies can illuminate major historiographical debates such as the history of tax revolts, federalism, local governance, and the development of US capitalism. Finally, I chart some of the directions historians can follow to study a wider array of school finance policies beyond the surface of state school funding formulae to make the role of policymakers at all levels of education policy more visible, and to further ground school finance developments in their racial contexts.

While US and Dominican officials have traditionally received credit for the expansion of the public school system during the US military occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, this article offers an alternative account by focusing on the role of guardians, or caretakers, in supporting and creating schools in this period. Drawing from sources from the Department of Public Instruction in the Dominican Republic and analyzing them “against the archival grain,” I argue that Dominican guardians were pivotal to the expansion of the Dominican school system and key actors in shaping the educational landscape during this period. Not only did guardians construct and maintain most of the schools opened during the US occupation, but they also shaped school policy. Most significantly, through their grassroots efforts, guardians and other volunteers ensured that schools in the Dominican Republic continued to operate during the financial crisis of 1921 that bankrupted the school system.

Contemporary asylum laws challenge the narratives of migrants and legal professional teams. Struggles arise in requirements to tell the right story defined by legal norms while storytelling in everyday life relies on sociocultural norms. Professionals working with socially and legally vulnerable populations, as in education and asylum cases, can bridge that gap if we understand narrating as a relational process with credibility and coherence developing over time in terms of the clients’ experience and institutional expectations. This paper presents dynamic storytelling methodology to guide such a process, applied successfully with a Roma community seeking inclusion in public education and used to interpret two unsuccessful asylum cases. Drawing on those examples, we conclude by proposing a socio-legal framework for collaborative lawyering in research on clinical legal training. The goal is a narrative process based on legal actors’ awareness that truth acquisition is a human sense-making process framed by human rights norms.

Historical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified teacher quality—a later trademark of NCLB—as a panacea for school improvement, but it remained an amorphous idea bound up in gendered and racialized assumptions. The historical results were a swirl of policies that increased standardization across the schools. This article concludes that teacher blame was a critical driver for federal intervention in local public education, and that the roots of that intervention extend far deeper than historians have allowed.

This article offers a comprehensive history of the development of the federal role in education and juvenile justice policy from the 1950s to the 1970s. We argue that the issues of juvenile delinquency and education became linked during this period and policies that were enacted reflected the belief that education was a solution to delinquency. In the mid-twentieth century, a broader variety of approaches to antidelinquency, such as public job creation for youth, began to fall out of favor and education became elevated as the primary policy area for addressing delinquency outside the criminal justice system. Policy makers frequently justified federal involvement in education by arguing that schools were central to antidelinquency efforts. Drawing educational institutions into the fight against delinquency made schools susceptible to the punitive turn in crime policy. Ultimately, these developments have introduced punitive policies into schools and pushed antidelinquency efforts away from broader structural reforms.

This article introduces and discusses the findings of the Canada School Choice Policy Index (CSCPI). This is the first index of its kind that measures the development of school choice policies across the Canadian provinces from 1980 to 2020 using eight unique indicators of choice. In contrast to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the CSCPI reveals that although Canada has witnessed an increase in school choice over time, this increase has largely been contained within public education systems rather than in the expansion of private education options. Our findings raise the importance of future research to address growing choice in public education systems across the provinces, in addition to choice in the private sphere.

Through a focus on liberal academic and policy networks, this article considers how ideas and practices central to an educational “war on poverty” grew through connections between postwar Puerto Rico, Latin America, and New York. In particular, it analyzes how social scientific ideas about education's role in economic development found ample ground in the colonial Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as the island assumed the role of “laboratory” of democracy and development after the Second World War. The narrative then considers how this Cold War programming came to influence education initiatives in both U.S. foreign aid programs in Latin America and New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as the number of Puerto Rican students grew amid the Puerto Rican Great Migration. Ultimately, the article suggests a broader hemispheric and imperial framework in narrating the evolution of postwar education policy in the nation's largest city.

States exert significant control over many different types of electoral institutions that influence the tone and direction of political representation in American democracy. Yet almost nothing is known about the consequences of the institution that has the greatest singular impact on the turnout and composition of the electorate: election timing. We argue that off-cycle elections will tend to produce governments that are not well-aligned with the political preferences of their median constituent. To empirically test this expectation, we examine the relationship between election timing and mass–elite congruence across local school district governments. Leveraging variation in election timing across districts within the same state, we find that board members are more likely to hold political preferences that are aligned with their constituents when boards are elected in on- versus off-cycle races. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of representation and election timing, suggesting some possible avenues for future research.