This article examines the recent expansion of the federal role into teacher workforce policy, primarily as embodied by the Race to the Top Fund of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Such recent federal teacher workforce policy reflects an important expansion of the federal role into a policy domain that deserves more attention. The financial incentives and governance arrangements structuring federal-state relationships under these policies have proven effective at facilitating the enactment of state-level reforms. However, these policies ultimately pay too little attention to fundamental governance questions that must be addressed for efficacious teacher workforce development.

Judicial decisions focusing on equal educational opportunity involve significant issues of educational governance and often involve explicit questions about the extent to which authority to make educational decisions should be centralized or decentralized across various institutions and entities. This review aims at clarifying scholars’ understanding of court-driven reform of educational governance to leverage equal educational opportunities across the major fields of school desegregation, school finance reform, and school choice. Issues of centralization and decentralization have particularly emerged in courts’ approaches to these fields with respect to both the judicial process and the substance of the policies themselves. An examination of these issues reveals a movement toward the decentralization of authority away from the courts that, at times, has reflected a growing judicial awareness of the courts’ strengths and weaknesses. Based on this examination, a more effective role for the courts in reforms aimed at promoting equal educational opportunity is considered.

Educational equality has long been a vital concept in US law and policy. Since Brown v. Board of Education, the concept of educational equality has remained markedly durable and animated major school reform efforts, including desegregation, school finance reform, the education of students with disabilities and English language learners, charter schools, voucher policies, the various iterations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (including No Child Left Behind) and the 'Stimulus'. Despite such attention, students' educational opportunities have remained persistently unequal as understandings of the goals underlying schooling, fundamental changes in educational governance, and the definition of an equal education have continually shifted. Drawing from law, education policy, history and political science, this book examines how the concept of equality in education law and policy has transformed from Brown through the Stimulus, the major factors influencing this transformation, and the significant problems that school reforms accordingly continue to face.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), a court defined science to decide the legitimacy of teaching intelligent design to high school biology students. This study analyzes Kitzmiller in light of the complex and interrelated tensions between judicial, scientific, and democratic decision making that lie at the heart of modern educational governance. This study particularly explores how these tensions become more acute where the meaning of science itself is contested and examines how these tensions can be structured and balanced in a nuanced way in the institutional setting of the courts. Based on this examination, this study highlights major issues that bear upon an analysis of when it is appropriate for governmental entities to define science for educational policy purposes.

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