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.

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.