NEPC Resources on Education Policy

We’d like to invite you to three education policy webinars co-sponsored by NEPC.

NEPC Researcher Christopher Saldaña Interviews Jennifer Jellison Holme and Kara Finniga...

NEPC Researcher Christopher Saldaña interviews Katherine Schultz, Dean and Professor of...

NEPC Researcher Christopher Saldaña interviews Dirk Zuschlag and Kristine Bowman about ...

This research brief investigates state fiscal powers over districts, providing the nece...

Today’s challenges for special education funding are rooted in a complex regulatory and...

This policy brief examines new ways that US public school districts are organizing and ...

A new resource provides guidance on policies that support community schools.

A Review Worth Sharing identifies serious methodological flaws in a high-profile evalua...

Lewis and Clark College Emeritus Professor of Education Gregory A. Smith interviews Lin...

Lewis and Clark College Emeritus Professor of Education Gregory A. Smith interviews Fai...

Building on the Declaration of Principles that was released in January of this year, th...

Digital technologies used in schools are increasingly being harnessed to amplify corpor...

In the five years since the first NEPC Annual Report on Virtual Education was released ...

What will it take to ensure that all children have an opportunity to learn and to thriv...

In this webinar, authors Bill Penuel, Liz Meyer, and Michelle Renée Valladares discuss ...

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is the latest reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the primary federal bill guiding K-12 education policy.

Research-Based Options for Education Policymaking is a multi-part brief that takes up important policy issues and identifies policies supported by research.

The fourth edition of the NEPC’s annual report on online and blended learning schools provides a detailed overview and inventory.

What will it take to ensure that all children have an opportunity to learn and to thriv...

Stanford education professor Martin Carnoy examines four main critiques of how international tests results are used in policymaking. Of particular interest are critiques of the policy analyses published by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Using average PISA scores as a comparative measure of student achievement is misleading for a number of reasons, Carnoy maintains:

Kevin Welner provides a commentary on this morning’s release of results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The lower grades on the Nation’s Report Card are not good news for anyone, but they are particularly bad news for those who have been vigorously advocating for “no excuses” approaches — standards-based testing and accountability policies like No Child Left Behind.

In this policy brief, Jennnifer King Rice revisits Horace Mann's vision of education as the balance wheel of society. She describes the current school system with its own inequities, far from the needed counter-balance to the opportunity gaps that arise from poverty, discrimination and other outside-school forces.

Promoting a legal strategy to achieve one set of ends can open the door for very different uses; in this case, that of teacher job protections and education rights litigation. In their eagerness to take on teacher job protections, the plaintiffs in Vergara v. State of California and follow-up litigation in New York may be inviting litigation with very different goals for school policy and reform.

Contact:  Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370, welner@colorado.edu

This 2015 report is third in a series of annual reports on virtual education in the U.S.. It is organized in three major sections. Section I examines the policy and political landscape associated with virtual schooling and describes the current state of affairs related to finance and governance, instructional program quality, and teacher quality. The authors analyze to what extent, if any, policy in the past year has moved toward or away from their 2014 recommendations.

As currently used, the Common Core will almost certainly exacerbate the policy failures of the past decade. The focus is on accountability, not on providing supports and resources to students and their teachers. This linking of Common Core to accountability regimes is a feature, not a bug -- it is what was intended from the outset. When politicians opt for accountability policies and market-based privatization policies, they supersede policies that are grounded in best practices -- evidence-based reforms that have succeeded in enhancing opportunities to learn.

This policy brief presents the most significant evidence-based critique of ostensibly “colorblind” education policies by highlighting their relationship to past and present racial/ethnic inequality and their failure to address the rapidly changing demographics of our school-age population, which could be considered an asset if we were not “blind” to it.

This second annual report in a series on virtual education is organized in three major sections. Section I examines the policy and political landscape associated with virtual schooling and describes the current state of affairs related to finance and governance, instructional program quality, and teacher quality. The authors analyze to what extent, if any, policy in the past year has moved toward or away from the 2013 recommendations. 

This national study, which comprehensively reviews 311 virtual schools operating in the United States, finds serious and systemic problems with the nation’s full-time cyber schools. Despite virtual schools’ track record of students falling behind their peers academically or dropping-out at higher rates, states and districts continue to expand virtual schools and online offerings to students, at high cost to taxpayers.

NEPC Provides Analysis of Obama Administration’s Research in Support of Its Education B...