Competitive discretionary grants (CDGs) have become a central tool in federal education policymaking, allowing the U.S. Department of Education to advance priorities through nonformula, competitive awards to states, districts, higher education institutions, and nonprofits. This essay documents the breadth of CDGs in today’s policy landscape, examines their appeal and limitations, and explores how they enable federal influence over education policy. It also reviews evidence on their effectiveness in improving educational systems and student outcomes. As debates over the federal education role in education policymaking intensify, understanding CDGs is essential for assessing their potential to shape policy futures.
Education research is increasingly generating evidence that can inform teachers’ practice. This raises the question: how should researchers communicate research to increase the likelihood of teachers putting the findings into practice? We conducted a vignette survey experiment in which 3,000 teachers were given a summary of a research project. We randomly varied the presence of nine components of the research summary suggested by the expectancy-value-cost model of motivation. Despite generating 512 different versions of the summary, we found no relationship between how it was designed and teachers’ intention to use the focal teaching practice. The findings suggest that improving written research communications may be insufficient to affect teachers’ intentions, let alone their practice.
School infrastructure is a critical yet often overlooked factor shaping student health, learning, and well-being. This study examines racial disparities in public school building conditions across New York State using building inspection data linked to demographic and fiscal data. Schools serving more students of color are significantly more likely to have poor overall conditions, inadequate ventilation, mold exposure, and reduced access to athletic fields, gymnasiums, and health offices. A Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that local property taxes are the largest contributor to racial gaps in building quality, while progressive state building aid helps reduce these disparities. These findings highlight persistent infrastructure inequities and the need for targeted investments to ensure all students have access to safe and healthy learning environments.
In many states, including Massachusetts, demand for high-quality career and technical education (CTE) has grown faster than program supply, raising concerns about equitable access. Using 15 cohorts of administrative data, this brief examines how participation in high-quality CTE has changed across students’ demographic groups. While overall participation and concentration have increased, these gains are unbalanced: Female students have become better represented, while Hispanic/Latino students and English language learners (ELLs) have not. Our findings suggest that underrepresentation among Hispanic/Latino students appears tied to their school access and choice, whereas ELLs face persistent within-school barriers to concentrating in high-quality CTE pathways.
Artificial intelligence (AI)—like many technologies before—comes with hope and worry about its implications for education. In this essay, using generative AI as a case, we appraise the ideological field of positions that stakeholders take in relation to educational technology overall. Drawing on science and technology studies, our analysis shows that education’s default position is optimism, even among those genuinely “critical” of technology’s capacity to amplify inequity. Refusal is not widely regarded as a legitimate response to educational technology. We argue, in contrast, that given the potential for scalable harm from unproven technologies like generative AI, the most rational position with new technology is robust caution with a readiness to refuse. We conclude by detailing three forms of refusal for educational stakeholders to consider: curricular, bureaucratic, and administrative.
