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The American educational policy agenda has been fraught with neoliberal laws that center educational improvement and innovation (Barros, 2012). Neoliberalism operates on the premise that market competition will spur excellence in educational opportunities and decrease the education debt in marginalized communities (Fejes & Salling Olesen, 2016). Moreover, in the case of urban education systemic reforms, researchers need to endeavor how marginalized communities relay their concerns or endorsements in the media. News articles are one appropriate unit of analysis for investigating this problem. In this paper, I examine how an education reform law in Puerto Rico, "Ley de Reforma Educativa de Puerto Rico" (LREPR), was reported on in the four most popular newspapers on the Island. Conducting content analysis of newspaper articles produced findings that contribute to the policy literature by describing three central frames found in the media coverage of LREPR: (a) rhetoric on the "Free Selection of Schools" school voucher program, (b) the effects of mass school closures on municipalities, and (c) rhetoric on Alianza Schools--Puerto Rico's Charter Schools Initiative. I close with how the frames depart from the Republican-leaning political affiliation of the newspapers and present a collective resistance to the neoliberal education reform policy.

The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization personnel, we sought to understand how Obama officials envisioned and changed the role of the federal government in fostering K-12 race-conscious educational policies and what mechanisms they used to advance priorities. We also explored changes Trump administration officials made to federal civil rights policies and through which institutional means. Our findings reveal through-lines between past and present political agendas and the methods for enactment. Obama's interagency efforts to reinvigorate civil rights oversight and enforcement in education harkened back to the mid-1960s era of bipartisan cooperation around school desegregation. Yet the decades-long legal and policy retrenchment against civil rights advances made in the 1960s constrained further progress. Trump's administration advocated for the privatization of public education through increased choice and opposed race-consciousness in education law and policy. The reshaping of the federal judiciary under Trump presents challenges for race-consciousness in the law for years to come. Recognizing these consistent through-lines and constraints will be essential for advocates and policymakers going forward.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has been frequently discussed as a framework that guides the design of inclusive learning environments for all students with and without disabilities. This policy brief reports on findings of a content analysis of how UDL was referenced in three major U.S. federal education laws. Results indicate that UDL was not explicitly defined although it was closely tied to alternative assessment and technology in K-12 education laws. References to UDL in the higher education law suggested using UDL to guide inclusive educational practices for post-secondary students and the need to integrate the framework into educator preparation.

There are currently 23 states in the United States that have laws considered as some form of school disturbance law. These do not include codes or laws specifying school discipline consequences such as suspension or expulsion. They vary widely in how broadly they can be applied and how broadly they define behaviors. Students are often not aware typical student misbehavior such as refusing to work, talking back, belching, or throwing paper airplanes could result in an arrest. These laws disproportionally impact students of color and students with disabilities. This article will review the breadth of these laws in the United States, their historical development and growth, and how the implementation of these laws disproportionally impacts students of color and students with disabilities. Suggestions for policy changes are included.

Rural school leaders encounter an array of complex issues that require legal counsel. Student discipline, contract disputes, employee conduct, special education, and a host of other topics require school boards and superintendents to utilize school attorneys. This descriptive phenomenological study explored the daily experiences of ten school attorneys representing multiple school districts in rural areas. Three salient themes emerged (a) the work of a school attorney, (b) relationships and interactions with school personnel, and (c) insights for others. Themes provide a comprehensive picture regarding school attorneys' roles, responsibilities, and engagements with school personnel within rural schools. Implications, including the importance of building relationships between school attorneys and school leaders and of gaining experience in schools are offered. Finally, future research with more school attorneys specializing in special education and disability law, who represent diverse and rich backgrounds in rural settings would augment the findings from this study.

It is stated that the "School Change" sanction should be applied to secondary school students if the acts listed in Article 55th of the Regulation on Pre-School and Primary Education Institutions of the Ministry of National Education are committed. Although the aforementioned Regulation states that the student behavior evaluation board should consider the student's age, developmental characteristics, and problems in implementing this sanction, it is known that the "School Change" sanction is applied in practice. The "School Change" sanction foreseen especially for students under the age of 12 in secondary schools may adversely affect the psychological, economic, and academic success of the child. However, in the TPC, it is stated that the child under the age of 12 does not have a criminal capacity and cannot be punished, as she cannot foresee the legal meaning and consequences of the act committed. On the other hand, there are differences in the evaluation and implementation of acts that require disciplinary punishment and those that constitute a crime. Even in terms of discipline, if a child under the age of 12 cannot perceive the meaning and consequences of an act, imposing a punishment that will negatively affect her future may cause irreparable consequences. For this reason, it is recommended to apply the "Condemnation" sanction instead of the "School Change" sanction for students younger than 12 years old.

This issue's Featured Article is bold! Readers are challenged to be advocates with loud voices, ready to push back on current legislation intended to silence voices in our classrooms and on our bookshelves. The author provides readers with an overview of laws and legislation currently impacting teachers and provides ideas for what you, as an educator, can do as a response. This includes innovative ideas for what reading and thinking can look like, proposing some new "literary laws" that you might apply in the face of censorship efforts that affect your teaching life.

The "Teaching Profession Law" came into force in February 2022 to regulate the professional rights of teachers. The scope and purpose of this law are to regulate the professional development and career steps of teachers. This research aimed to determine the opinions of teachers about the new law of the profession. It is a descriptive study in survey design. Teachers (379 female, 285 male) from all school types, teaching levels, geographical regions, and seniority participated voluntarily in this study. Teachers think that the new professional law will not improve their rights and increase the prestige of the profession. Teachers think that the new law of professional development is not adequately discussed or discussed based on scientific data. According to teachers, the new professional law does not encourage professional development. Teachers stated that though they generally support the need for such a profession law, the new law should be discussed more opportunities that are promising should be offered to teachers.

The growth of state laws creating private school vouchers and charter schools has mounting and alarming ramifications for students' rights, and those ramifications are shaped by a complex and shifting set of legal rules. This article explains the interplay between the increase of these school-choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court's recent free-exercise decisions, long-standing antidiscrimination laws, and the now-tenuous applicability of those legal protections for choice students. It concludes by considering the political ramifications of these changes, which will likely be very different in "blue" and "red" states.

This research investigates the extent to which educational law features and is constructed in the Teaching Council's documentation for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes (2017, 2020) and in the "Code of Professional Conduct for Teachers" (Code) (2016), and analyses teachers' required knowledge of the law across these documents. Document analysis was used to track changes and provide insights. The findings indicate that teachers' knowledge of educational law has a low profile in the criteria used to review and accredit ITE programmes. Despite significant developments in law related to schools and teachers since 2017, including additional statutory requirements for child protection, the 2020 document does not have a commensurate increase in emphasis on law. Contrastingly, the findings indicate a high profile, and a high bar, for teachers' knowledge of the law in the Code. Recommendations include that the Teaching Council analyse graduates' legal knowledge during registration to ensure that they have the requisite skills to adequately perform as a professional; that the emphasis on educational law be increased in the ITE criteria so that it is aligned with the Code, and that programme providers fulfil their duty of care to students by providing them with adequate standalone modules on educational law.

Educational psychologists face challenging decisions around ethical dilemmas to uphold the rights of all children. Due to finite government resources for supporting all learners, one of the roles of educational psychologists is to apply for this funding on behalf of schools and children. Tensions can emerge when unintended ethical dilemmas arise through decisions that compromise their professional judgement. This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study around educational psychologists' understandings and concerns around ethical dilemmas they faced within New Zealand over the past 5 years. The study set out to explore how educational psychologists manage the ethical conflicts and inner contradictions within their work. The findings suggest that such pressures could influence evidence-based practice in subtle ways when in the course of decision making, practitioners experienced some form of ethical drift. There is seldom one correct solution across similar situations. Although these practitioners experienced discomfort in their actions they rationalised their decisions based on external forces such as organisational demands or funding formulas. This illustrates the relational, contextual, organisational and personal influences on how and when 'ethical drift' occurs.

In England and Wales, fee-charging independent schools can be legally classified as charities and, therefore, receive associated benefits, the most obvious being taxation advantages. The high fees charged by many of these schools create financial exclusivity, which, it will be seen, confers significant social and cultural capital to those who can meet the economic barrier to entry. High fees lead to increased wealth for the schools, which is augmented by their charitable fiscal benefits. In exchange for receiving these charitable benefits, one might expect charity law to place significant social contribution requirements on these schools. However, this paper will argue that this is not the case: the law, in fact, requires very little from charitable independent schools. In practice, charity law cannot mitigate inequalities within elite education nor justify their taxation advantages.

Informed by the conceptual-analytical framework of LPP and bilingual education policy, this study addresses a unique and under-researched case of heritage language education policy for complementary Polish State Schools abroad. These are Polish governmental educational offering aimed at Polish migrants and their descendants. Data consist of two policy documents issued by Polish parliamentary and governmental authorities and are analyzed through qualitative content analysis. The specific research question is: What ideological and implementational spaces can be identified in the policy documents regarding the following six areas: academic goal; language ideology; linguistic goal; language orientation; bilingualism orientation; cultural orientation? The findings show that the policy opens up implementational and ideological spaces not only for language maintenance but also for various epistemic goals and literacy forms that create opportunities for a multifaceted personal and societal development of the students. Polish language and culture are positioned both as right and as resource, and spaces for cultural pluralism and plurilingualism emerge. Even if bilingualism and biliteracy are not explicitly expressed as goals, the policy recognizes the multiple linguistic realities of the students by assuming bilingualism, the orientation that is here called bilingualism as default. Future research directions are suggested in the conclusion.

Children with disabilities or specialized healthcare needs were legally excluded from U.S. public education for decades, but in the last 45 years, they have gained tremendous ground in receiving comparable educational opportunities as their non-disabled peers. The purpose of this article is to provide a historical review of the educational laws which affect children with disabilities, so that school nurses who work with these children understand the impact of these laws and the resulting changes in school nursing practice. Review of the United States' educational history provides school nurses the working background necessary to recognize their key role to support the education of children with disabilities and to advocate for these children's educational rights with their parents, school officials and policy makers.

This paper starts with the increasing discussions on juridification in education. Concerning theorizing on such processes, we examine the poor implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD (2008) in the school sector of Germany. The paper considers the reasons for this failed endeavor by analyzing the complex, multilevel relations between policy and law in different national and historical contexts. With this, aspects of juridification as a process in education policy can be illuminated. In this regard, we suggest crucial aspects regarding juridification in public education: a focus on regulative failures in juridification processes, juridification's contexts, the mandate for putting it into action, the allocation of resources, and finally, its objective and subjective rights dimensions, i.e. how an individual can claim rights within the machinery of public education.

In recent years, research into educational leadership has prompted growing appreciation for the critical role which both cultural and societal tenets can have in shaping school leadership approaches. With that in mind, this study examines a school leadership model grounded in Islamic values and beliefs. More specifically, this study attempts to develop an Islamic-Oriented Educational Leadership (IOEL) model for Muslim school leaders. This is an exploratory study designed within a qualitative paradigm of the interpretive, grounded theory process. Data were collected from twenty-four international experts in Islamic educational leadership. Two main themes related to the IOEL model emerged from data analysis, namely: (a) Holistic Islamic Education, and (b) Cultivating Effective Model Leaders. Moreover, the researchers assert that the ways in which a school principal's ethical and religious beliefs affect their mindset illustrate the significance of context in shaping school leadership. This study's findings have practical implications.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) recently had its 30th anniversary. Emerging from the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, it has since become the most ratified international human rights treaty ever. Most European countries ratified it and are thus obliged to ensure the implementation of children's rights in practice. Operationalizing the UNCRC raises practical, conceptual and ethical issues. For example, questions arise concerning children and young people's competence to make autonomous decisions in different social domains, especially in education. There are also debates about children's involvement in dispute resolution and the extent to which rights must always be associated with redress in order to make them meaningful. Clearly, the relationship between the rights of children and young people on the one hand and those of parents and teachers on the other are particularly salient. In addition, challenges may arise in relation to children from the Roma-minority in educational institutions. Article 28 (1) of the UNCRC stresses that "States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity". Nonetheless, Roma students frequently experience multiple forms of discrimination in educational institutions which amplify their existing disadvantage. Across Europe, there have been different rates of progress in terms of incorporating aspects of the UNCRC into domestic law and put them into practice in schools and other education institutions, and in many cases Roma children have yet to experience the benefits of enhanced children's rights.

This article presents a qualitative study of how undocumented students experience a unique dimension of legal oppression in the U.S. that results in diminishing their hope in a country that they consider their home. Throughout this study and with the use of a Critical Legal Studies perspective, the author interrogates the role that U.S. immigration law plays in creating hostile and, many times, hopeless scenarios for undocumented youth trying to receive an education. By identifying the ways that undocumented youth face both "de jure" and "de facto" detrimental consequences, this study demonstrates how a double layer of legal oppression is formed that is omnipresent in the minds and lives of undocumented students. It is argued that, as educators, it is important to comprehend that undocumented students live under the constant threat of legal enforcement as they traverse the U.S. educational system from K-12 through college. As classroom instructors, this unique dimension is not always apparent because we either do not know that someone is undocumented, or, unless we are undocumented, we do not sufficiently understand what it means to be undocumented. This article attempts to help better understand this experience through the voices of college-bound, undocumented youth from California and Arizona.

Litigation in education has drastically risen over past decades, representing the need for teachers to have a foundational knowledge of the educational laws which govern them. The myriad of educational law sources and the perpetually changing nature of school law serve as barriers for teachers' competence in educational law. The purpose of this study was to identify the specific in-service educational law training needs of Texas school-based agricultural education (SBAE) teachers. Furthermore, this study sought to determine the effect of background characteristics on teacher's perceived competence on educational law issues. An educational law needs assessment was distributed to a probabilistic sample of Texas SBAE teachers (n = 325). Two-hundred and thirteen teachers completed the needs assessment, yielding a response rate of 65.5%. The Texas SBAE teachers identified (1) qualified immunity, (2) search and seizure of students, (3) transportation of students in school and (4) personal vehicles, and (5) teacher-initiated removal of students as their highest-ranked educational law in-service needs. The results of a factorial ANOVA indicated the educational law competence of teachers was significantly different based on the amount of previous educational law training the teacher had received.

During (and after) the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational communities have employed distance education to reach their students. However, not all districts are aware of the legal requirements of using instructional materials in a virtual setting. In recognition of the growth of virtual learning environments, Congress passed the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act in 2002 with the goal of redefining the circumstances and rules under which nonprofit and educational institutions might digitally use copyright protected materials. For districts exploring or expanding opportunities in distance education, understanding the laws that pertain to the use of digital, copyrighted materials is of critical importance. This article explores and explains these requirements for policymakers, site and district leadership, and classroom instructors.

This paper analyses the origin, development and fall of the 'school voucher' system in Spain. It was called the Ley de Financiación de la Enseñanza Obligatoria (Compulsory Education Financing Law) (LFEO), and this reform represented the first attempt at an international level to establish a school voucher model for a whole country. This article attempts to explain the importance of the new ideas that emerged from the Economics of Education and International Organisation to understand the origin of the proposed LFEO. It also focuses on its development and the parliamentary debate of the law. Finally, it explains how other foreign ideas began to compete to establish models of equal opportunities in education different from the one proposed. The paper provides a valuable insight into how educational transfers take place, and the importance of the role that local actors can play in the development and, in this case, the failure of such transfers.

A large number of Religious Orders administered and taught in Catholic elementary and secondary schools. This article examines their contributions to the Catholic formation and education of their students by their witness and curriculum. It discusses their contributions and the extent of them in the light of the provincial environment in which they worked. It examines the different laws and practices in each of Canada's provinces which enhance or limit the contributions of the Religious Orders.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) appears to offer states and districts discretion to develop teacher evaluation policies, including those that may use Value Added Models (VAMs). While scholars are discussing this flexibility, limited attention has been paid to the potential role of the law in connection with the future use of VAMs in evaluation policy. While VAMs may be declining in use, several states require or permit them, making the continued assessment relevant. Moreover, given that VAMs were at the center of numerous high-profile lawsuits, assessing litigation outcomes in the context of ESSA is a useful exercise, particularly for jurisdictions that may use (or contemplate their use) of VAMs. Toward this end, this paper applies legal research methods and a law and policy framework to review lawsuits concerning VAMs to distill key principles for state and local policymakers.

This article is a discussion of the role of the University Counsel (sometimes called the General Counsel) as "adviser, officer, administrator, and agent" in the university setting. The article discusses the nature of the "fiduciary duty" in university governance and describes several of the substantive areas of the law with which the University Counsel must become familiar: faculty employment and tenure discussions; share governance; sponsored research; student rights; and the many issues relating to college athletics.