Education Policy Analysis Archives

Continuing the conversation: “Life is Good”—David Berliner's legacy

Jeanne M. Powers — 2026-03-17

Throughout his journey from applied researcher to world-renowned scholar, David Berliner was committed to education research that matters—not just within academic circles, but within classrooms and communities. As a public intellectual and a fierce advocate for public education, David expertly and courageously engaged in education debates, bridged research with practice, debunked myths and exposed misinformation, and in the process, reshaped how we understand education. This special issue of EPAA/AAPE celebrates David Berliner's legacy as a scholar, and more importantly, as someone who was deeply respected and cherished. What follows are personal essays by family members, friends, and colleagues that engage with David's ideas and inspire us to continue the conversations that David valued and fought for.

A complete list of his EPAA/AAPE articles may be found at: David C. Berliner Collection | Education Policy Analysis Archives

David Berliner's article, Educational Reform in an Era of Disinformation (1993) was the second article published in EPAA/AAPE. It launched David’s career as a scholar of educational policyand formed the basis of his award-winning book with Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis.

From Salamanca to the present: Configurations and tensions in initial teacher education for inclusion

Javier Campos-Martínez — 2026-02-24

This introductory article examines advances, setbacks, and challenges in the programs of initial teacher education for inclusion, 30 years after the Salamanca Declaration. Drawing on recent international reports, policy documents, and empirical research, the article provides an updated overview of challenges facing teacher education, including persistent inequalities and the limited diversification of the teaching workforce. It situates inclusive education as a contested field shaped by policy developments and uneven institutional responses across contexts. The article reviews key conceptual shifts in the understanding of inclusion, moving beyond disability-centered approaches toward broader perspectives, and analyzes how these shifts have reshaped expectations of the teaching profession. It also identifies ongoing limitations within initial teacher education, such as deficit-based approaches and curricular fragmentation. Finally, the article introduces and contextualizes the contributions that compose the special issue, outlining how each article addresses these challenges from different contexts and analytical approaches.

Advancing equitable access to quality education globally: Innovations in curriculum, teacher education, and professional development

Maria Teresa Tatto — 2026-01-13

This article introduces the special issue “Advancing Equitable Access to Quality Education Globally: Innovations in Curriculum, Teacher Education, and Professional Development,” featuring articles that report on a multi-country project examining the challenges and opportunities of globalization for three types of reforms that have seen significant innovation in the past decade. These reforms encompass the school curriculum, teachers' education, and teachers' professional development (collectively referred to in this article as SCTEPD). The reporting countries were undergoing rapid transformation that incorporated the three reforms when we began our work, and included: India, New Zealand, Peru, Scotland, and Wales. This introductory article offers a retrospective and prospective discussion of global reforms in three key areas of SCTEPD, providing context for the articles that follow. In this introductory article, we use Cohen and Mehta's (2017) theoretical framework to analyze these reforms, aiming to understand the conditions that lead to successful, lasting reforms and the extent to which these reforms have increased equity and quality in education for all learners.

Introduction to the special issue: Science of Reading policies

Rachael Gabriel — 2025-11-11

Over the past decade, a wave of literacy policy reforms—often framed under the banners of the “Science of Reading” (SoR) and the “right to read”—has spread internationally from England to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. These reforms, while consistent in their emphasis on structured approaches to early reading instruction, have sparked significant controversy and debate. This special issue examines the global phenomenon of literacy-focused education reform, exploring how reading is constructed as a policy problem and mobilized through political agendas, media narratives, and privatized intermediary organizations. Contributors analyze the complex interplay between policy implementation and educational infrastructure, revealing how reforms influence not only pedagogy but also curriculum, assessment, professional development, and leadership. Drawing on diverse international contexts and methodological approaches, the papers interrogate the consequences of centralized control, rapid implementation, and market-driven solutions. Findings suggest that despite widespread adoption, SoR-related policies have not consistently led to improved outcomes or equity and often exacerbate systemic issues such as racial and linguistic oppression. The issue highlights the dangers of politically driven pedagogy and the erosion of educational expertise, raising critical questions about accountability, democratic governance, and the future of literacy education.

School coexistence policies between democracy and control: Multilevel policy reconfigurations in Mexico and Morelos

Erika Rivero — 2026-08-11

This study examines school coexistence policy in Mexico as a dynamic process of configuration, translation, and reconfiguration across multiple levels, from its normative formulation to its appropriation in school practice. Adopting a qualitative sociocritical approach, a multilevel design was developed that articulates the analysis of national policy frameworks, their recontextualization in the state of Morelos, and their interpretation in the practices of primary and secondary school teachers and principals. The analysis was guided by dimensions derived from the paradigms of control and sanction, and democratic coexistence. The findings show that the policy is configured as a hybrid structure marked by tension, in which formative orientations coexist with regulatory dispositifs, with a predominance of a logic of control and risk management, particularly at the local level. This is reinforced by institutional conditions and contexts shaped by violence and insecurity. Nevertheless, in school practice, teachers and principals reconfigure policy through situated strategies that prioritize relationships and the pedagogical meaning of coexistence. The study contributes to understanding school coexistence as a field of tensions among normative regulation, institutional conditions, and teacher agency.

Certificates without learning: Effects of automatic promotion in Mexico

Barbara Alejandra Sandoval-Gayosso — 2026-07-28

Primary school teachers face multiple challenges stemming from the public policy of automatic promotion implemented in Mexico since 2013, aimed at ensuring school access and retention. This policy has intensified preexisting difficulties and generated new ones, including declining school attendance, the devaluation of schooling and the teaching profession, and issues associated with addressing student diversity and learning gaps, understood as the mismatch between expected learning outcomes and curricular standards. Within a qualitative paradigm, analogical hermeneutics was articulated as an inductive procedure within grounded theory to analyze teachers’ perceptions in urban primary schools in the Mexican states of Veracruz and Morelos. One of the most relevant findings is the devaluation of schooling, which weakens teachers’ pedagogical authority and reconfigures interactions with families. The elimination of grade retention has reduced shared family responsibility, shifting the focus from attendance and learning toward certificate attainment. This suggests that, historically, the value attributed to teachers and schools has rested more on ensuring credentialing than on guaranteeing meaningful learning.

Governmentality and psychopolitics in education: The case of regulating cell phone use in Brazilian schools

Jean Lucas da Silva Queiroz — 2026-03-31

This article examines education policy on cellphones in schools through a qualitative documentary analysis of Law 15.100/2025, Decree 12.385/2025, CNE/CEB Resolution No. 2/2025, and the MEC RED collection. Drawing on governmentality, psychopolitics, and neoliberal rationality, and employing framing, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and WPR, or What’s the Problem Represented to be?, we analyze how the policy constructs the problem of cellphone use, allocates responsibility, and configures techniques of conduct. The findings indicate a shift of risk from digital platforms to students’, families’, and schools’ behavior, strengthening local accountability and affective self‑regulation. The literature suggests only partial coherence between the diagnosis (attention economy, youth mental distress) and instruments (ban, awareness, and pastoral care), with limited corporate co‑responsibility and a lack of safety by design. Evidences suggest that the curricularization of “digital education” consolidates the pedagogization of the norm. We conclude that adequate protection requires combining school‑level restrictions with structural regulation (algorithmic transparency, protective defaults, and privacy/safety by design), realigning responsibility toward platforms and the state.

Local educational autonomy and student achievement: Constructing a state-level school district autonomy index in the United States

Bongyoung Kim — 2026-03-31

Drawing on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Center for Education Statistics, and state property tax indicators, the analysis employs exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical regression to assess the relationship between district autonomy and student achievement. Results suggest that fiscal flexibility and administrative discretion are positively associated with higher mathematics and SAT performance, whereas punitive oversight mechanisms correlate negatively with performance. These findings underscore that autonomy enhances educational effectiveness only when accompanied by institutional capacity and accountability. By providing a replicable framework for measuring school district autonomy, this study advances empirical understanding of decentralization in K–12 education and offers policymakers a measurement framework for balancing local discretion with equitable governance.

Municipalities’ different interpretations of justice for families who do not participate in local school choice regimes

Hanna Sjögren — 2026-07-28

The aim of this paper is to explore differences in how civil servants in Sweden organize and justify their policies towards families who do not make a school choice. We draw on theories about competition as a social construction as well as different notions of justice in education. We present descriptive statistics from a large-scale quantitative data set and conduct a qualitative content analysis of interviews with civil servants to study school choice policies in Sweden, well known for its consumer and market-oriented education policies for the past 35 years. We identify that municipalities that organize mandatory school choice have both different policies and different justifications towards families who, despite information campaigns and other activities, fail or refuse to make an active school choice. The study makes an empirical contribution to the previously theorized relationship between choice and competition and offers a nuanced understanding of differences in how local authorities organize and justify allocation policies in their school choice regimes. We raise the question of whether extensive localized differences towards families are justified in an educational system that has an outspoken agenda towards equal treatment and equally good education for all no matter of the student’s family background.

Should teacher observation systems be used for making high-stakes decisions?

Michael Strong — 2026-04-07

This study questions the suitability of teaching observation data for making high-stakes decisions that affect teachers. We define suitability (the extent to which intended purposes are advanced without causing undue harm) and argue that it fundamentally depends on the technical properties of the data produced by an observation system, which, in turn, depend on the attributes designed into the system. We conducted an experiment to understand better the relationship between the attributes of teaching observation systems and the suitability of their data. We compared three systems with different attributes, including rubrics that impose varying inference loads on raters. Experienced raters were randomly assigned to a system and properly trained. Then, they evaluated the instruction of advanced teacher candidates by viewing videos of their lessons. We considered three criteria when judging the resulting data: the power to predict a teacher’s contribution to student learning, the correlation of scores across systems, and rater agreement within systems. We found that a system with a low inference load (along with other attributes) outperformed systems with higher inference loads, but it may still be insufficient for making confident, high-stakes decisions. We maintain that few, if any, widely used observation systems are.