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This study investigates how individual states raise revenue to pay for elementary-secondary education spending following school finance reforms (SFRs). We identify states that increased and sustained education expenditures after reform, search for legislative statutes that appropriated more education spending, and assess how policymakers funded the SFRs. Our results show that state legislatures increase investments in education by increasing tax revenue streams, such as sales and excise taxes, and by taking over property tax collections. Considering these results, we discuss that increased state investment in education should be accompanied by a policy mechanism to distribute state aid equitably to districts. Moreover, policymakers should consider local voters' preferences when implementing SFR policies, as tax increases may reduce local fiscal effort for education.

This essay analyzes the rhetorical framing tactics of a group of disability activists to understand how they use key words, topic shifts, and other framing maneuvers to amplify marginalized voices in public debates. Focusing on a town hall meeting and a legislator update meeting between activists and lawmakers, the author uses "stasis" theory to analyze how these maneuvers (1) create gateways for marginalized voices to enter the discussion and (2) anchor deliberations around topics of importance to the disabled community. This suggests a more complex role for framing in face-to-face deliberative contexts than studies of framing strategies in written texts have traditionally considered. I argue that a multidimensional view of framing uniting consideration of word choice with attention to interactive dynamics is necessary to appreciate how framing maneuvers can not only shape the content of debates but amplify the voices of people excluded by the tacit rules of democratic deliberation.

We consider the statistical inference for noisy incomplete binary (or 1-bit) matrix. Despite the importance of uncertainty quantification to matrix completion, most of the categorical matrix completion literature focuses on point estimation and prediction. This paper moves one step further toward the statistical inference for binary matrix completion. Under a popular nonlinear factor analysis model, we obtain a point estimator and derive its asymptotic normality. Moreover, our analysis adopts a flexible missing-entry design that does not require a random sampling scheme as required by most of the existing asymptotic results for matrix completion. Under reasonable conditions, the proposed estimator is statistically efficient and optimal in the sense that the Cramer-Rao lower bound is achieved asymptotically for the model parameters. Two applications are considered, including (1) linking two forms of an educational test and (2) linking the roll call voting records from multiple years in the United States Senate. The first application enables the comparison between examinees who took different test forms, and the second application allows us to compare the liberal-conservativeness of senators who did not serve in the Senate at the same time.

Background: Nearly two decades have passed since the last successful reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Since then, student loan debt and the accumulation patterns based on race have become a pressing issue to address in U.S. society. Purpose: Student debt is one of the key issues on the federal higher education policy agenda. The purpose of this paper is to examine how race is addressed in a congressional hearing held to discuss the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Specifically, we examined one congressional policy markup hearing to understand how members frame student debt and the racialized dynamics embedded within. Research Design: We combined critical race theory and racial frames to discursively analyze 14 hours of congressional hearings on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Through critical discourse analysis, we interrogated the racialized discourse among policymakers as they proposed solutions and alternatives to address the issue of student debt during the policy markup process. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our findings highlight four types of discourse within a policy markup hearing: "All Students" Matter, Paternalistic, Race-Evasive, and Explicit Racial Discourse. We offer recommendations for policymakers and researchers to contend with ahistoricism and race-evasiveness prevalent in policy markup hearings and ways for future policy proposals to be more explicit in naming the groups facing disproportionate negative impact, the mechanisms that produce such inequities, and interventions that can address them.

Background: Elected members of the US Congress rely on staff, including fellows with scientific and engineering expertise, to find and interpret information for use in policymaking. Factors that impede, or facilitate, the communication of scientific information within the institution thus can play a critical role in legislative capacity, but there is a limited understanding of these dynamics in the hyper-partisan body. Aims and objectives: This study presents and tests a four-dimensional model describing how the obstacles to science communication in Congress change depending on whether information is sought for use in support of established policy positions ('strategic use') or to inform decision making ('substantive use'). Methods: Data were collected between November 2017 and February 2019 through interviews with 58 congressional staff members in personal offices assigned to energy, natural resources, and science issue portfolios, and through surveys with 68 science and engineering fellows who completed their year in Congress between 2015 and 2019. Findings: Placing scientists and engineers in Congress as fellows augments staffing and institutional expertise. Yet we find that both staff and fellows experience communication-related impediments in using scientific information. Staff report more challenges in using science to substantively make policy decisions, due not only to lack of time, but also factors such as contacts, access, and information presentation. Fellows report fewer barriers and use science for policy in largely identical ways to staff. Discussion and conclusion: These findings support the proposed model and highlight the importance of staff scientific fluency and the decision-making context for science communication in Congress.

Background: Understanding how policymakers define research and differentiate it from other sources of data is critical for scientists to improve how they conduct and communicate research to policy audiences. Yet, few studies have explicitly asked policymakers -- particularly state legislators in the USA -- how they define research evidence. Methods: We sought to fill this gap via in-depth interviews with 168 policymakers from two Midwestern states; 32 of whom were nominated by their colleagues as exemplar research users. Findings were triangulated via interviews with experienced key informants from both states. In-depth interviews were the preferred methodology for our research question, as they offered legislators the chance to describe research in their own words and elaborate on examples when needed. Findings: For many legislators, definitions of research largely aligned with how the scientific community might define research; both Republicans and Democrats defined research as peer-reviewed studies with specific qualities that distinguish research evidence from other types of information. However, some legislators defined research with a broader lens, including different types of information (for example, anecdotes) and qualities of information (for example, accessibility, relevance, credibility, and unbiased) as part of their definition. Discussion and conclusions: Researchers may better engage policy audiences by referring to the types and qualities legislators mentioned because policymakers prefer evidence from rigorous studies to those that are poorly executed or politically motivated. Legislators called this 'bogus' research, 'party' research or 'pseudoscience'. Researchers can signal their credibility by being transparent regarding funding sources and reasons or motivation for conducting studies.

Drawing on intersectionality and representational identity theory, this article centers Black women legislators' collective and individual experiences to examine how their experiences shape their policy ways of knowing and education policy priorities. The women were guided by their own lived experiences of witnessing unequal educational opportunities of students of color and shaped a policy agenda that shifted the widely endorsed cultural norms and policy behavior of the state. As individuals and as a collective, they deployed their Black feminist narrative to promote racial literacy in public policy, reimagined a new policy culture, and sought education parity and equality through multiple policy paths. The women approached education policies not exclusively through the domain of education issues; rather, they recognized the interconnectedness of the historical and present social, economic, and political lives of Black and communities of color.

In education, low-income and racially minoritized students in urban districts are often constructed as 'dependent' -- weak in their social positions but deserving of educational opportunity. This social construction of 'urban' students has been central to school choice politics and policymaking in the United States. In this study, I interrogate one particular aspect of this social construction: the way low-income and racially minoritized students are represented in quantitative data. I use school choice in Detroit, Michigan as an illustrative case; I conduct a critical discourse analysis of exchanges between former United States Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and members of Congress about school choice, and the quantitative research referenced during those exchanges. The study demonstrates how dominant conceptions of 'urban' education in the United States influence the production of data and research on school choice, and in turn the role those quantifications play in school choice discourse.

Drawing on longitudinal data of state K--12 education policymaker demographics, we examine education policymaking body diversity over time, and across states and institutional structures. Though dominated by white businessmen, females and professional educators increased their presence at the education policymaking table. There was little movement in representation of policymakers of color. Institutional structures such as election type and professionalism were related to greater representation of females and persons of color in state education policymaking bodies.

Latinxs, especially Latino males, have lower college completion rates, but studies find that community cultural wealth is prominent in the narratives of those who succeed in higher education. By focusing on current students or recent graduates, the literature has not examined how a college completion experience aided by community cultural wealth impacts Latinxs who have an opportunity to influence education policy. Consequently, this study investigates the role of community cultural wealth in the college completion experience of three Latino U.S. Congressmen: Tony Cárdenas, Henry Cuellar, and Raúl Grijalva. Findings suggest that community cultural wealth had a substantial impact on these Congressmen completing college. These results provide higher education greater insight into how policies and advocacy strategies grounded in community cultural wealth can be successful and improve the higher educational pathways and graduation rates of Latinxs.

Legislative professionalism is central to the politico-institutional context of postsecondary policy adoption in state governments. The core argument in existing research is that as legislative professionalism increases, structural capacity for decision-making increases. Evidence for this argument is mixed, exclusively quantitative, and assumes a bureaucratic logic. The goal of this study is to deepen understanding of legislative professionalism by examining how policy stakeholders perceive the postsecondary policy environment in a "citizen legislature." The study draws on 26 in-depth interviews with higher education stakeholders in Nevada. The findings contribute empirically to the literature by demonstrating that legislative professionalism can be understood in terms of the meanings assigned distinctive legislative environments. The results also make a conceptual contribution to this literature by showing how loose coupling in interorganizational relations and bounded rationality shape the policy environment--in ways that yield benefits for some institutions and disadvantages for others.

Driving across tracts of new-home development in El Paso, Texas, one can't miss the signs of charter-school momentum. Charter-school enrollment has been growing in Texas for years, but in many localities and even at the state level, charter schools had until recently encountered harsher treatment from policymakers than what advocates have experienced in El Paso. Texas mirrors an underappreciated story that is emerging across the nation as the country moves beyond the pandemic. This growth across the nation, as in Texas, has been accompanied by pronounced policy progress. Perhaps the most striking feature of the charter-school movement over the past half decade has been its sheer staying power--parents and educators simply carrying on in the face of persistent opposition.

This paper explores the movement of the New York City Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT) for "equal pay for equal work" in teaching salaries, which it won in 1911. The IAWT's success sheds light on the possibilities and limits of women teachers advocating for change within a feminized profession. Leading the movement were of a group of women teachers, organizing before woman's suffrage and in an era of sex-differentiated work and pay, who convinced the city's public and state's legislators that they deserved pay equal to what men teachers received. They did so by strategic maneuvering in city and state politics and making equal pay look reasonable. And they did so by narrowly defining their goals and leaning on their identities as women to push a theoretically sex-neutral claim of justice. Their success, though limited, was nonetheless a victory in shifting ideas about women's societal and professional status in New York City and the state.

This article examines the relation between education, voting and representation, and, in particular, the argument that more highly educated people should have more votes, as they should be better at judging important political decisions. In the past this issue attracted the attention of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Newman and Mill. In the UK there is also a practical precedent, rarely recalled today, where for centuries university graduates had their own representatives in Parliament. There are also some interesting contemporary arguments on the topic put forward in favour of an epistocracy (as some call it) by social scientists, but not educators. It seems that most educators would not now dare to suggest that the more highly educated might be given more votes, largely on the grounds of equity.

Especially since 2010, conservative interests' dominance at advancing their preferred policies across U.S. states has been clear, with large and escalating impacts in education. Although adversaries on the political left remain in catch-up mode, there have been auspicious developments. This study focuses on one of these, seeking to understand a uniquely positioned progressively state-focused policy organization called State Innovation Exchange (SiX). It was aimed to a) provide a valuable case study of perhaps the leading organization in this space, focusing on understanding its education policy footprint; b) further understandings of conflicts, tensions, and responses on the political left relative to education policy; and c) generate insights into contemporary sub-national policy mobility. We interviewed nine key stakeholders and analyzed electronic materials to address two research questions. Findings demonstrate SiX fulfills four main purposes: 1) building and sustaining cross-state progressive power; 2) acting as a counter; 3) fostering progressive leader development; and 4) advancing progressive policies/ideas. SiX shows an economics-focused agenda emphasizing working- and middle-class families, and education policy has not been a major, consistent area of emphasis. SiX does, however, play unique roles in education (as in other areas) by connecting state legislators and supporting their work. Specific to education, we surfaced some challenges SiX has faced in building alignment around a shared vision. We suggest, if SiX or a similarly situated organization can develop a clear education philosophy and policy agenda, it will be more effective at advancing its preferred policies, and in countering those being advanced by adversaries. Absent such shifts, we project continued conservative dominance of education policy at the state level.

The increasing influence of private interests in public policy has been facilitated by a growth in sources of "alternative" information and expertise. In education, teachers and schools are often the targets of these sources. This has been associated with a new political economy where private interests advance reform agendas largely through funding new information sources that ignore long-standing empirical evidence on factors shaping school outcomes in favor of anecdotes and misunderstandings about issues in education. This manuscript argues "information pollution" relative to U.S. politics and policy is presently at crisis levels, and that it is particularly acute relative to education policy. In this policy area, we show how special interests are using (mis)information strategies to purportedly elevate parent voices but are in effect promoting the interests of private actors and de-professionalizing both expertise and educators. We seek to understand this major issue, placing it within a broader sociopolitical context. The concluding discussion considers what might be required to move in a healthier direction that would bring U.S. education policy and practice into closer alignment with evidence and expertise.

Few studies have examined the growing trend of teacher-legislators, specifically teachers' trajectory to elected office. Drawing on qualitative data and raced-gendered frameworks, this article examines how three female teachers of color in one Southwest state leveraged their teaching experiences to shape their policy priorities and how they navigated policy and political environments. The teacher-legislators in this article created counter-narratives on teachers and their abilities. Their experiences illustrate how teacher-legislators resisted and transformed state policies that affected urban students.

In recent years, the US society has witnessed a sharp growth in political divide, particularly between those holding conservative and liberal views (Pew Research Center, 2014, 2017). Among the multitude of issues that the American people find divisive, the issue on gun regulation has been one of the most controversial ones (Pew Research Center, 2021) wherein attitudes towards guns vary drastically and are divided along partisan lines. Citizens take to platforms of civic participation such as town hall meetings to express concerns about such divisive issues and seek accountability from politicians. This analysis focuses on one such instance and documents how, with the focal issue of high-capacity firearms, both the citizen and politician adjust their next actions in this gun regulation discussion. Specifically, the author observes how the citizen reformulates the notion of gun rights while the politician shifts the perspectives of his responses.

Democracy is based on individuals' ability to give their opinions freely. To do this, they must have access to a multitude of reliable information sources (Dahl, 1998), and this greatly depends on the characteristics of their media environments. Today, one of the main issues individuals face is the significant amount of disinformation circulating through social networks. This study focuses on parliamentary disinformation. It examines how parliamentarians contribute to generating information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) in the digital public space. Through an exploratory content analysis--a descriptive content analysis of 2,307 messages posted on Twitter accounts of parliamentary spokespeople and representatives of the main list of each political party in the Spanish Lower House of Parliament--we explore disinformation rhetoric. The results allow us to conclude that, while the volume of messages shared by parliamentarians on issues susceptible to disinformation is relatively low (14% of tweets), both the themes of the tweets (COVID-19, sex-based violence, migrants or LGBTI), as well as their tone and argumentative and discursive lines, contribute to generating distrust through institutional criticism or their peers. The study deepens current knowledge of the disinformation generated by political elites, key agents of the construction of polarising narratives.

President Barack Obama's use of the hedging language is an evidence of his unique mastery of rhetorical strategies, power of persuasion and an influential speaker. The purpose of this study was to identify and retrieve the hedging devices contained in President Obama's speeches. For this purpose, his most important and decisive speeches were selected including two inaugural addresses, an annual message to Congress on the state of the Union and Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech. These speeches were processed through Salager-Mayer's taxonomy of hedges, which facilitated the classification of their respective categories, frequencies and pragmatic functions of hedging language. The data analysis process involved a mixed method of research design, first to count the number of the hedge words, calculate their occurrence rates; and then discuss them qualitatively to identify the reasons why specific hedges, and not others, were used. The processing of the data showed that the modal auxiliary verb 'can', a catchword in Obama's campaign slogan "Yes, we can", was the most often used hedging device. This finding points to a lack of variety and complexity in political language as far as hedging devices are concerned. However, the overall number of hedging devices found in Obama's speeches is a high figure. This elicits the importance of hedging in political discourse, and proves that Obama was very mindful of his language each time he addressed the nation. His rhetorical skills found in hedging outlets of expression to fulfill some purposes but at varying degrees: possibility and persuasion, on the one hand, and fuzziness and vagueness. However, given the limited number of the speeches processed in this research, the result needs to be confirmed by the analysis of the wider corpus of Obama's pre- and post-election speeches.

Background: It is widely recognised that policymakers use research deemed relevant, yet little is understood about ways to enhance perceived relevance of research evidence. Observing policymakers' access of research online provides a pragmatic way to investigate predictors of relevance. Aims and objectives: This study investigates a range of relevance indicators including committee assignments, public statements, issue prevalence, or the policymaker's name or district. Methods: In a series of four rapid-cycle randomised control trials (RCTs), the present work systematically explores science communication strategies by studying indicators of perceived relevance. State legislators, state staffers, and federal staffers were emailed fact sheets on issues of COVID (Trial 1, N = 3403), exploitation (Trial 2, N = 6846), police violence (Trial 3, N = 3488), and domestic violence (Trial 4, N = 3888). Findings: Across these trials, personalising the subject line to the legislator's name or district and targeting recipients based on committee assignment consistently improved engagement. Mentions of subject matter in public statements was inconsistently associated, and state-level prevalence of the issue was largely not associated with email engagement behaviour. Discussion and conclusions: Together, these results indicate a benefit of targeting legislators based on committee assignments and of personalising the subject line with legislator information. This work further operationalises practical indicators of personal relevance and demonstrates a novel method of how to test science communication strategies among policymakers. Building enduring capacity for testing science communication will improve tactics to cut through the noise during times of political crisis.

In this case study, I draw attention to key Nevada Latina/o legislators' policy ways of knowing and their higher education policy priorities. A focus on the policy actors uncovered structural, racial, and cultural assumptions in policy-making often absent in the exclusive analysis of policy interventions. Their policy ways of knowing were shaped in at least three ways: acknowledging and naming the sources of structural inequities, embracing political humility, and challenging policy knowledge-generating practices.

Competition among parties is a central feature of democratic politics, but extreme partisanship can undermine democratic practices and institutions. We report the results of a formative curricular intervention involving reflective discussions designed to avoid hyper-partisanship in a training program for anyone--including university students--with political aspirations. The opportunity was provided by an annual Institute for Future Legislators at the University of British Columbia. The program offered weekend boot camps, followed by a parliamentary simulation held in the chambers of the provincial legislature. Data were collected from questionnaires and facilitated reflective discussions. Thematic content analysis of transcriptions of these discussions showed that they enabled participants to gain detachment from their parties, even as their appreciation grew for the complex balancing acts that partisan politicians must continuously perform.

Education is central to creating well-informed citizens capable of participating in social and political life. However, civic education in some liberal democratic societies has often focused on teaching students the mechanics and structure of party politics, overlooking many of the public virtues that help to sustain democratic life. In this article we examine one such virtue, i.e., civility, and its role in party politics. We focus especially on partisan 'civility as politeness,' which entails the norms of politeness and etiquette that regulate partisans' speech and behaviour during electoral campaigns and within legislatures. We analyse partisan civility as politeness and explore its connection with two other dimensions of partisan civility, i.e., 'moral civility' and 'justificatory civility.' We conclude by developing recommendations on how to advance civility in party politics by creating well-informed citizens and politicians who recognize the importance of civility in democratic life.

The purpose of this study is to investigate policy coalitions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) at U.S. congressional hearings. This study is grounded in the advocacy coalition framework, which argues that advocacy coalitions are forged by policy actors who have similar policy preferences. To identify the coalitions, according to the policy claims articulated by policy actors, discourse network analysis was performed to examine 30 testimonies in the congressional hearings on ESSA since its passage in 2015. The policy actors fall into eight categories: (1) federal administrative and executive offices, (2) state administrative and executive offices, (3) teachers unions, (4) interest groups, (5) superintendents, (6) teacher, (7) education professor, and (8) Congress members. The results of discourse network analysis suggest four coalitions based on the actors' policy claims on (1) equity, (2) assessment and accountability, (3) states have changed/passed legislation to align the state accountability systems with ESSA goals, and (4) the U.S. Department of Education's state plan approval was inconsistent with the ESSA statutory provisions. The findings provide timely insights into the ongoing process of ESSA implementation at the federal, state, and local levels

Although there is a rich critical literature examining international student policy in Canada, very little of it considers the views of Members of Parliament. MPs have limited direct influence over international student policy, but their policy talk about international students defines the context within which such policy is developed. For that reason Parliamentary debate deserves study. This paper examines MPs' discussion of international students between 1984 and 2019, tracing themes in MP policy talk over the globalization era. It finds that MPs evince remarkably consistent attitudes towards international students. Throughout the period MP policy talk shows that Parliamentarians saw international students as outsiders who were only of value to the extent that they could be made to serve Canada's economic or political agenda. The uniformity of this attitude and the lack of dissenting voices suggest that MPs' views may be a significant barrier to reforming international student policy in Canada.

Kuwait's Constitution defines the small Arab Gulf nation as a constitutional democracy led by a hereditary emirate, although outside observers have questioned the degree to which it is indeed democratic. Despite such scepticism, Kuwait has undoubtedly taken some steps to promote democratization, including the introduction of the Constitution and Human Rights (CHR) module to the national curriculum to teach high students about civics, democracy and rights. While previous studies have explored the perspectives of Kuwaiti students and teachers towards democracy in general and the CHR in particular, the perspectives of Kuwaiti politicians have not been previously explored. To better understand their perspectives of and experiences towards democracy and education for democracy, this study employed a phenomenological approach involving 15-to-30-min semi-structured interviews with five Kuwait politicians who have served as either Members of the Kuwaiti National Assembly or Ministers or both. The themes that emerged included Active Versus Passive Democracy, Homegrown Versus Imported Democracy, Culture and Democracy and Education for Democracy, which are discussed in greater detail in the article.

Politics, as in many spheres of life in the Philippines, is still very much a male enclave. From the smallest government unit up to the national level, men dominate (Gemba, 2001). The study aimed to find out the factors that facilitates or restrains women candidates from participating in the political arena. This study was conducted among Lady Vice Mayors and Councillors from the Municipal Council and City Council in the province of Bulacan as well as the Lady Board Members of the Provincial Council of Bulacan. The study covers the personal characteristics of the candidates, their motivation to entering the political arena, the challenges and issues they faced as candidate and legislator, and the strategies they applied to overcome these hurdles. The study utilized a validated survey instrument from the survey conducted by the Royal University of Bhutan in 2014. Data for this study was gathered through the Office the Head of the Council or directly from the respondents by administering the survey instrument. The results indicate that the average age of the respondents is forty (Mean=40) years old. Majority of the respondents are married and majority of them had one to three children. The respondents have commendable educational background at college or university level. The main motivation factors of the respondents to running for office are the desire to bring community development; and, to promote gender equality within their respective communities. The family continues to be the biggest source of motivation and moral support for the women candidates. During the performance of their elective positions, the respondents continue to experience challenges like understanding the legal process, time management issues, and consultation skills--all are crucial to their legislative work.

This article seeks to analyse how epistemic work (Alasuutari, 2018; Alasuutari and Qadir, 2019) in Portuguese parliamentary education debates develops through externalisation to world situations (Schriewer, 1990) whose references are used as epistemic capital (Alasuutari, 2018). The study explores debates occurring during Legislature X (2005-2009), in which the number of external references in plenary education debates significantly peaked compared with previous and subsequent legislatures. The analysis demonstrates that there was a change in the (de-)legitimation strategies policymakers used during this legislature. In addition to using the traditional ideological principles associated with each party, deputies often opted to use international organisations and their instruments, alongside reference societies, as authoritative sources to strengthen arguments and persuade their audience of their validity. This suggests that parliamentary policymakers assume that these external elements are useful in earning support for their policy ideas and promoting reform proposals.

In this article, we examine the extent to which women teachers ran for state legislative office in 2018, where they won, and the degree to which they contributed to the surge of women representatives elected in state legislatures around the country. We engaged in a comprehensive effort to collect information on all of the teacher candidates who ran for seats in state legislatures during the 2018 midterm elections. We found that 430 teacher candidates ran for a state legislative office. These candidates were fairly evenly split between men (51%) and women (49%), and tended to reflect the racial demographics of the teaching profession. Most teacher candidates ran as Democrats (69%) and 33% came from the six states that experienced teacher walkouts during spring 2018. We found that men and women teacher candidates were similarly likely to win the general election, but due to the higher proportion of women teacher candidates running relative to the men-dominated composition of state legislatures, the teacher candidates contributed to the increase in the descriptive representation of women in state legislatures after the 2018 midterm elections. Women teacher candidates won 61 seats in the 2018 midterm elections, which represents about 3% of the 1839 seats won by women in state legislatures in 2018. Although our work focuses on only a single election cycle, if teacher candidacy is a growing trend, then political engagement from the women-dominated profession of teaching may create new growth in the number of women lawmakers in the United States.

Although the literature contains many recommendations for professional advocacy for school counseling, there is a dearth of research providing clear and contemporary evidence of effective strategies for advocating for elementary school counseling. In response to this gap in the literature, we conducted a phenomenological qualitative study of 13 professionals who successfully advocated for elementary school counseling positions or roles. We outline research-informed elementary school counseling advocacy strategies identified by participants, centering around three themes: (a) looking inward and developing one's advocacy skills, (b) working with stakeholders, and (c) using data to advocate. We include implications for practice and research.

Leaders of education policy continue to decentralize school districts, particularly in predominately large urban districts, despite mixed results from this reform. In this article, we seek to explain how decentralization came to fruition through the policymaking process in one of the largest and most diverse districts in the United States that serves urban, suburban, and rural communities. Employing concepts related to advocacy coalitions and critical policy analysis, our analysis suggests that the policymaking process to decentralize this district was complex, messy, and political with clear delineations between those voices that were (un)heard and (un)involved.