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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

Opting out of state standardized tests has recently become a movement--a series of grassroots, organized efforts to refuse to take high-stakes state standardized tests. In particular, the opt-out rates in the state of New York reached 20% in 2015 and 21% in 2016. This study aims to illustrate the social networks and examine the paradoxes that have propelled the opt-out movement in New York--the movement's epicenter with the highest opt-out rate in the United States. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of social movement theory, social network theory, and policy paradox, this study compiled the opt-out corpus by using the data from 221 press-coverage and 30 archival documents. Social network analysis was performed by examining the relational data that suggest coalition ties between movement actors. Further, to explicate how the movement actors forged coalition ties, all data in the corpus were then coded by Stone's framework of policy paradox regarding how the movement goals were articulated, how the movement was framed, and what policy solutions were mobilized. In addition to identifying the movement actors and two competing coalitions, it is found that to forge coalition ties, the movement actors in the opposing coalitions articulated contested goals of standardized testing, framed the movement via symbols, numbers, and interests, as well as mobilized policy solutions via inducements, rights, and power. The findings have important and timely implications for policymakers and movement actors as they seek and advance on common ground to make substantive changes in education policy.

Background/Context: Since 2013, opting out of state standardized tests has become a movement--the grassroots, organized efforts to refuse to take high-stakes state standardized tests. In particular, opt-out rates in the state of New York have been consistently fluctuating around 20%. Purpose/Objective: This study aims to examine the actor coalitions and discourse coalitions that have propelled the opt-out movement in the state of New York--the movement's epicenter with the highest opt-out rate in the United States. Conceptual Framework: This study is conceptually grounded in the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), a prominent conceptual lens to investigate the formation of coalitions and their impact on policymaking. The ACF posits that advocacy coalitions are forged by policy actors who have similar policy preferences. By contrast, differences in policy preferences are manifested in the discourse that serves to defend or propose coherent arguments as justifications for policy preferences held by the opposition coalitions. Research Design: This study compiled the Opt-out Discourse Data Set by using data from 323 press articles and 52 archival documents from 2015 to 2018. Each news article or archival document was coded with three variables: movement actors, statements articulated by the actors, and the actors' sentiment toward the statements. An actor-statement bipartite network, an actor coalition network, and a discourse coalition network were created, respectively. Next, Freeman degree centrality was calculated to identify major actors and their statements. The network metrics of density and connectedness of the two competing coalitions were calculated to compare the coalitions' network structure. Findings: In the actor coalition network, the movement advocacy coalition is clearly more densely connected than the movement opposition coalition in terms of the number of actors, coalition density, and coalition connectedness. The discourse coalition network shows similar patterns: the movement advocacy coalition is densely connected, as evidenced by the numbers of nodes in each coalition and the network metrics of coalition density and connectedness. Conclusions/Recommendations: This study concludes with a discussion on how the future of the opt-out movement depends on (1) how the movement advocacy coalition continues to amass power and influence in education policymaking, and (2) how the New York State Education Department exercises its power over implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Moreover, this article demonstrates the application of discourse network analysis to examine qualitative data in education research. The discourse network approach is particularly instrumental in explaining a policy output by identifying coalitions and their interactions within and across the coalitions.

The purpose of this study is to examine the public opinion on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Twitter. Using Twitter Application Program Interface (API), we collected the tweets containing the hashtags #CommonCore and #CCSS for 12 months from 2014 to 2015. A Common Core corpus was created by compiling all the collected 660,051 tweets. The results of sentiment analysis suggest Twitter users expressed overwhelmingly negative sentiment toward the CCSS in all 50 states. Five topic clusters were detected by cluster analysis of the hashtag co-occurrence network. We also found that most of the opinion leaders were those who expressed negative sentiment toward the CCSS on Twitter. This study for the first time demonstrates how text mining techniques can be applied to education policy research, laying the foundation for real-time analytics of public opinion on education policies, thereby informing policymaking and implementation.

Purpose: Given the essential role of theories in research, this study aims to identify the theories and concepts undergirding educational leadership research, illuminate the interconnections among them, and examine the evolution of the theoretical groundings of the field from 2005 to 2014. Methods: This study constructed a concept co-occurrence network, in which the nodes represent all the framing concepts that theoretically framed the 1,328 articles published in four leading educational leadership research journals ("Educational Administration Quarterly," "Journal of Educational Administration," "Educational Management Administration & Leadership," and "Journal of School Leadership") over the past decade and the ties link the concepts that co-occur in an article. The reference frequency and centrality measures were used to identify the influential concepts. Next, the k-core analysis was performed to visualize the interconnections among the concepts. Moreover, a series of network cohesion measures were used to detect the changes in conceptual cohesion over the past decade. Findings: While 295 framing concepts guided the educational leadership empirical studies, a small number of concepts exerted a disproportionately large influence on the research. Furthermore, these influential concepts closely interplay with one another, and the strongest interconnection was seen between the concepts of leadership approaches and organizational perspectives. Last, the increasingly pluralistic theoretical foundation did not yield the growing conceptual cohesion in educational leadership. Implications: This study for the first time elucidates the structure and evolution of the theoretical groundings of educational leadership research, laying the foundation for further theory development and inviting researchers to bring conceptual cohesion to this field through integrating concepts, allowing random ideas to mutate, and developing new theories.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to uncover how knowledge is exchanged and disseminated in the educational administration research literature through the journal citation network. Design/ Methodology/Approach: Drawing upon social network theory and citation network studies in other disciplines, the authors constructed an educational administration journal citation network by extracting all 157,372 citations from 5,359 journal articles in 30 educational administration journals from 2009 to 2013. The authors then performed social network analysis to visualize the network structure by journal clusters, and quantified journal prominence and interdisciplinarity by calculating Freeman indegree and betweenness, respectively. In addition to journal-to-journal citations, the authors examined the sources of non-journal citations by citation counts. Findings: The results of journal prominence, interdisciplinarity, and eight journal clusters in the citation network indicate that educational administration, as a porous field, intimately interacts with the sub-fields of education (e.g. urban education and teacher education), other disciplines (e.g. economics, human resources, sociology, and psychology), and the research internationally. In addition to journals as the knowledge source (45.29 percent), the authors also found books (31.08 percent) and reports (14.98 percent) are important citation sources in the educational administration research literature. The most cited books and reports shed light on the knowledge base in the theory, research, and practice of educational administration. Originality/Value: The results of this by far the largest-scale study of educational administration journals present abundant evidence that educational administration is a porous field. This study also presents social network analysis as an alternative method to evaluate journal influence in the educational administration field.

Purpose : This response cautions against narrowly interpreting Hallinger's bibliometric findings on the intellectual structure and impact of Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ). It highlights two main issues when using citations to measure influence. Response Argument : First, citations reflect a variety of motivations beyond acknowledging intellectual contribution, such as persuasion, allegiance-signaling, and preferential attachment. The sleeping beauty phenomenon and citation bias can further distort the interpretation of bibliometric findings. Second, setting thresholds for co-citation networks renders the periphery invisible; however, the periphery contains anomalies that could spur future paradigm shifts. Implications : The response urges embracing diverse views and nuanced interpretations to prevent perpetuating existing inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combined network analysis and meta-analysis to systematically review the literature on the Teaching and Learning International Survey, focusing on the interplay between leadership practices and school-level conditions. Our initial network analysis utilized 83 nodes (variables in the reviewed studies) and 214 ties (variable associations), whereas our subsequent meta-analysis employed 21 selected variable associations. Results suggested that leadership practices interplayed with school-level conditions through multiple, interconnected variable associations with a range of effect sizes. First, variables concerning teacher working conditions and teacher qualifications indicated relatively smaller effects than teacher self-efficacy. Second, the association between teacher self-efficacy and teacher collaboration indicated the strongest effect among other variable associations, followed by the relationship between collective teacher perceptions of distributed leadership and teacher job satisfaction. Third, variables regarding teacher perceptions of the principal's leadership effectiveness had larger effect sizes than the principal's self-assessment of their leadership practices. Results further suggested teacher self-efficacy and teacher collaboration as the two most prominent variables that would potentially play a bridging role between leadership practices and school-level conditions. We provide implications for educational leadership practices and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School leadership research literature has a large number of widely used constructs. Could fewer constructs bring more clarity? This study evaluates construct content validity, defined as the extent to which a measure's items reflect a theoretical content domain, in school leadership literature. To do so, we reviewed 29 articles that used Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) as data sources to study school leadership, and developed a construct co-occurrence network in which nodes represented constructs in the 29 reviewed articles and ties connected a pair of constructs that used the same TALIS survey items. Among the 82 constructs, 43 constructs had overlapping measures with one another in the TALIS literature on school leadership. Results of network analysis suggest three problematic issues with constructs of TALIS literature on school leadership: (1) same measures for different constructs, (2) different measures for the same constructs, and (3) missing alignment between theoretical and operational definitions. To strive for construct clarity, we provide four recommendations for future research: (1) efforts to prevent construct proliferation, (2) alignment of theoretical and operational definitions, (3) rigorous evaluation of construct validity, and (4) following a fundamental principle of parsimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]