Kentucky Education Policy Blog

Here are my additions to the flurry of December reading lists as the two best published books in 2020 on the topic of education policy.   The first is School House Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina.  Since I teach courses on the history of education and school law and policy, this book was particularly interesting to me.  Black adeptly traces the current challenges in public education to their historical roots from the Early National Period through Reconstruction. He makes a very compelling case that many of these threats are direct challenges to democracy overall. The second book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door , is by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, the hosts of the popular policy podcast Have You Heard .  Schneider and Berkshire address the growing movement toward privatization.  One of the best sections of the book focuses on challenges to tea...

  Adequacy funding in education is one of the defining education policy issues of the past 50 years. Since the economic downturn in 2008, shortfalls in state revenues have led to widespread reductions in state education budgets bringing adequacy arguments back to the forefront.  The attached link is a preprint of a case study that examines two states-- Kentucky and Kansas-- and compares the evolution of the politics and policy of adequacy efforts as an approach to education finance prior to and since 2008. The study is based on a white paper that I published for the Kentucky Superintendent's Association in 2019 and research that I conducted while studying education policy at Johns Hopkins University in 2018.   It is kind of a sad fact that challenges of adequacy funding have not become outdated.  Access the preprint here:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340953009_Case_Study-_Education_Fiscal_Policy