Education policy

Pandemic lessons 2: Phenomena

Well over a million Americans dead. Formal schooling disrupted for months, and in many cases several years. Mental health challenges and the emergence of a virulent culture war aimed at multiple levels of education. This has been the pandemic experience for millions of children, college students, and their families. Future historians will have a longer-term […]

Pandemic lessons 1: Explanandum

For three years, from January 2020 to December 2022, the United States fed its most vulnerable school-age children better than it educated them. This isn’t hard to see: after the pandemic began closing schools in early 2022, schools gained permission and figured out how to shift from in-school feeding to grab-and-go meals. In contrast, there […]

What we can learn from a half-century of federal special education reform (part 3)

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I described the five factors that shaped the past half-century of education reform focused on the rights and needs of individuals with disabilities: politics, deliberately designed policies and practices, history, emergent patterns of practices, and policy feedback. These factors can help explain some puzzles about this […]

What we can learn from a half-century of federal special education reform (part 2)

In part 1, I looked back at 50 years of education reform focused on students with disabilities and explained two of the five factors that shaped the last half-century of this history: political efforts to secure the educational rights of individuals with disabilities; and efforts to plan or design either education policy or educational techniques […]

What we can learn from a half-century of federal special education reform (part 1)

Two major historical anniversaries in American education passed by this summer without significant public comment: consent decrees that ended two federal lawsuits in May and August 1972, lawsuits intended to open up educational access for children with disabilities in Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. Before these lawsuits, it had been regularly practice since early in the […]