The Vital Necessity of Critical Education Policy Research

Abstract

Critical education policy research has a deep-rooted history, evolving over four decades to challenge traditional positivist approaches. Reimagining epistemology, theory, and methods, scholars pioneered critical policy analysis (CPA), examining power dynamics and contextual influences on educational experiences. In the ensuing paragraphs, we explore how the articles in this volume exemplify critical approaches to policy analysis, examining topics such as racial inequalities in college recruitment, platform technologies’ impact on policy, and racialized discourses in corporal punishment policies. Embracing critical theories and methodologies, scholars reveal how language, hierarchy, and privilege construct realities, perpetuate inequities, and reinforce power structures, and they advocate for equitable policy solutions, challenging the status quo to envision a more just educational future.

Critical approaches to education policy research have a long, rich history. Nearly four decades ago, dissatisfied with positivist approaches that dominated the field and failed to take into consideration all that can influence and affect people’s experiences, scholars interrogated both the assumptions and practices of this traditional scholarship; reimagined epistemology, theory, and methods; and ushered in new approaches to the exploration of educational policy (Diem et al., 2014; Young & Diem, 2024). These approaches, which are theoretically and methodologically eclectic, have come to be known as critical policy analysis (CPA).

Although the majority of critical policy analyses are qualitative and examine a variety of data sources, from interviews to the analysis of archival material, the recent emergence of critical quantitative inquiry in the early 2000s further expanded the methodological approaches used by critical policy scholars (Tabron & Thomas, 2023; Young & Diem, 2024), as evidenced by several of the pieces in this special issue. On the surface, these approaches may not seem too different from more conventional approaches; however, there are important distinctions, from the “deep analysis and concentrated looking into social and historical context[s] in which phenomena exist in order to reveal underlying patterns, relationships, meanings and structures” to the examination of power, voice, interests, and impact (Young & Diem, 2024, p. 3). Theoretically, CPA draws from theories and methods associated with post-positivism, constructivism, and poststructuralism. The articles appearing in this volume, for example, draw on critical theory, critical race theory, abolitionist theory, (e)quality politics theory, and theories of social construction.

The need for critical policy research in the current historical moment in education and society more broadly is palpable. Attacks on public education have quickened at a frenzied pace; teachers, principals, and superintendents are maligned; and elected officials have effectively prevented the use of inclusive and culturally responsive curriculum content and instructional practices in a growing number of states. Meanwhile, practices to exclude and punish racially minoritized students, students with disabilities, and transgender students persist even as growing evidence demonstrates the educational and emotional harm of such practices (Dhaliwal et al., 2024).

The contributions in this special issue tackle important issues in PK–12 schools and higher education using critical frameworks and methods that engage questions about equity, disparity, power, and privilege. Their critical questions and methods reflect a desire to understand deeply and to challenge and unpack status quo understandings and practices, challenging notions like “it should be this way,” “it has always been this way,” or “there is no other way.” As such, these pieces are inherently and critically political.

In the paragraphs that follow, we summarize each of the articles included in this volume, intertwined with our own reflections, reactions, critiques, and suggestions for this and future critical policy analyses.

Troubling Technology in Education

In “A Sociological Analysis of Structural Racism in ‘Student List’ Lead Generation Products,” Jaquette and Salazar (2024) explore the racial inequalities linked to prospective college student lists. These lists serve as “a match-making intermediary” and assist colleges in their recruitment efforts. Research shows that participating in student list products is positively associated with college access, particularly for underrepresented students (Howell et al., 2021; Moore, 2017; Smith et al., 2022). However, the design of these lists may perpetuate structural racism and inequality that harms racially minoritized students’ higher education opportunities. Jaquette and Salazar (2024) explore this phenomenon through an analysis of the College Board Student Search Service, focusing on the relationship between racialized search filters and the mix of included versus excluded students and the ways public universities utilize racialized filters alongside other search filters when purchasing student lists.

In their research, Jaquette and Salazar (2024) recreated the College Board Student Search Service using a national sample from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. They examined 830 student lists from 14 public universities to assess the use of racialized search filters. This analysis enabled them to demonstrate the racial composition of the student lists purchased (actual and simulated) that applied multiple filters simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, simulations revealed racial disparities associated with academic and geographic search filters, with historical, race-based exclusion influencing these inputs. Moreover, of the student lists examined, they found that one or more racialized inputs are often used in the search filters. The simulations further demonstrated compounded racial disparities between included versus excluded prospective students.

As Jaquette and Salazar (2024) note, both universities and public schools are more often using digital platforms and software to assist them in performing important everyday operations. While these devices and products can help with efficiency, they are not without their limitations, nor are they immune to the structural racism embedded within them. Indeed, if these devices and products are not monitored or structured to promote racial equality, existing inequality will persist. As colleges and public schools increasingly seek outside assistance with daily operations, more critical analyses of third-party platforms and products are needed, not just to reveal their potential issues but also to recommend how they can be structured to mitigate racial disparities.

In their conceptual article, “Platform Governance and Education Policy: Power and Politics in Emerging Edtech Ecologies,” Nichols and Dixon-Román (2024) use literature from critical platform studies and CPA to explore how platform technologies shape education policy by brokering relations among commercial, technical, and educational actors and how these relations may affect educational equity as they become embedded into existing governance regimes. Using diffractive methodology, they elucidate how observations from scholarship on critical platform studies and CPA are “reinforced or complicated by those of the other, and vice versa” (Nichols & Dixon-Román, 2024).

Nichols and Dixon-Román’s (2024) CPA points to how platform governance overlaps with education governance regimes; it is not a “separate or supplemental regime, but a convergent one—fusing with other regimes while coaxing each to comport with the social, technical, and political-economic relations that constitute and animate its activities.” Platform technologies, integral to both professional and personal aspects of our lives, not only provide us with a product or a service, but they also use and analyze the data from users to maintain or alter their products. Their analysis, akin to Jaquette and Salazar’s (2024) research, raises questions about winners and losers in the platformization of education and whether those they are designed for (students, teachers, or administrators) truly benefit (Diem et al., 2014). While platforms may be adopted to address inequities and improve infrastructures and evidence-based decision-making in schools, the way they are designed can actually reinforce structural inequalities. Indeed, like the racialized inputs used in search filters in student lists for prospective college students, platform technologies used in public schools are not “neutral tools” and are designed with “interests and imperatives which shape the conditions for equitable education in schools” (Nichols & Dixon-Román, 2024).

The Need to Grapple With Realities and Tensions

In Eupha Jeanne Daramola’s (2024) article, “Racially Just Policy Change: Examining the Consequences of Black Education Imaginaries for K–12 Policy,” she exemplifies the integration of theory and action. Daramola showcases how Black radical imaginaries address inequities—including those linked to the school-to-prison nexus exacerbated by school research officers (SRO)—proposing solutions that might seem unconventional and beyond the status quo. Daramola demonstrates the tensions involved in families’ attempts to rightfully seek fugitive spaces outside of schools or use abolitionist efforts to push for reforms within schools. Although the parents saw themselves as working on a critical educational issue (i.e., dismantling anti-Black racism), public education advocates and teacher unions viewed their efforts as in line with efforts to dismantle public schooling, which leaves many of our most vulnerable children and families without access to quality neighborhood schools or fugitive spaces. Families are caught in the crosshairs of a neoliberal policy agenda, where no choice is acceptable.

Daramola’s (2024) article effectively illustrates the potential of Black education imaginaries in creating Black fugitive spaces; yet, as the author acknowledges, there is room for a more thorough exploration of tensions within the neoliberal agendas embraced by these Black activist groups. This limitation, possibly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the convenience of Zoom interviews, may have hindered an in-depth examination of the contextual roots of policy development, implementation, and the consequences of these organizations. For instance, a deeper analysis of the micro-school model, its connection to companies like Prenda adopted by one of the Black organizations, or an assessment of the organizations’ political engagement in supporting school choice policies may have revealed unintended consequences that merit consideration when organizations pursue fugitive spaces such as those that Daramola (2024) describes.

In their article, “Recommending Reform: A Critical Race and Critical Policy Analysis of Research Recommendations About School Resource Officers,” Zabala-Eisshofer et al. (2024) examine policy recommendations related to SROs included in peer-reviewed research articles, highlighting disturbing trends. These trends include both the presence of misalignment between evidence and policy recommendations and the absence of policy recommendations altogether. Although policymakers and practitioners may not read peer-reviewed journals for many reasons (e.g., paywalls, technical language), assuming they do, their focus is likely to center on the policy recommendations. Consequently, scholars, especially CPA scholars, must approach these sections seriously, align them with findings, and challenge the status quo by offering policy recommendations grounded in critical theories, as exemplified by the authors in this special issue.

While there are a number of reasons why authors shy away from providing policy recommendations, from constraints such as journal page limits to the psychological toll involved in framing policy recommendations that comprehensively counter status quo practices, what is left unsaid in journal articles can be just as powerful as what is said. Furthermore, absent, deferential, generalized, and misaligned policy recommendations generally appeal to the status quo, which favors reforms that are seemingly more feasible or practical over ones that appear too “radical” and unrealistic due to the politicization of a topic. The authors also found few articles that offer recommendations grounded in abolitionist theory, indicating that those scholars who study SROs may be using less critical theories to guide their research and the development of findings and implications.

These findings demonstrate the vital need for and value of CPA scholarship and suggest an opportunity for further research on SROs as more educational scholars access critical theories from other disciplines, such as abolitionist theory. We must ensure that our work does not just critique systems of injustice, and we must be willing to offer concrete solutions to the problems that we are studying. Furthermore, our recommendations should not only align with the evidence we find but be willing to offer counternarratives that truly address educational inequities and injustices.

That said, the authors could have grappled more with what it means to support an abolitionist agenda in an era of increasing school shootings that are also putting minoritized children in harm’s way. These tensions are crucial because they reflect discussions happening on the ground among policymakers, educational leaders, families, and youth as they try to proactively counter the culture of school shootings, often perceived as challenging without the presence of police, particularly as necessary gun law reform has been repeatedly thwarted.

The Power of Discourse

In “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child? A Critical Discourse Analysis of State Corporal Punishment Policies and Practices,” Dhaliwal et al. (2024) argue that school discipline policies, particularly corporal punishment (CP), need to acknowledge the central role of race. Despite extensive research demonstrating the negative impact of CP on learning and social-emotional development (Gershoff et al., 2019; Grogan-Kaylor et al., 2018; Jackson et al., 2010), 15 states still practice it. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), an approach for critically exploring power as it is exercised through language, the authors aim to understand the states’ rationales for continuing CP, the relationship between rationales and patterns of practice, and how they reflect discourses related to power, control, and punishment. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the authors qualitatively analyzed policy language from the 15 states and quantitatively analyzed CP data from the Office of Civil Rights, exploring the relationship between language and practice while uncovering overarching discourses influencing policy and practice.

The authors found three overarching discourses or “logics” supporting the continuation of CP: “morality,” “delinquency,” and “authority.” Morality has its roots in Christian religious teachings as a tool for moral development to bring children “into accordance with divine authority.” Pseudo-scientific theories of human development, historically tied to racial superiority and the idea that humans were more responsive to physical sensation than reason, further influence this discourse. Delinquency discourse assumes CP is necessary to ensure a safe and orderly learning environment. State policy documents justify its use to protect teachers and learners from “disruptive” and “violent” students, labels that historically have been used to justify violence against certain groups by portraying them as unworthy of empathy. The third discourse, authority, refers to language in policy documents establishing the authority of schools to physically punish students, regardless of parental preferences. The legal doctrine of in loco parentis (in place of parents) gives educators considerable disciplinary authority, and the authors found that most states offered a form of immunity that shielded them from prosecution for excessive punishment.

As the Zabala-Eisshofer et al. (2024) and Dhaliwal et al. (2024) articles highlight, CPA is a particularly powerful tool for exploring policies that establish power and control in public education, particularly those that result in the disciplining and punishing of students of color and the disempowerment of Black and Brown families. Dhaliwal et al.’s (2024) mixed-methods approach, which explored both the content of education policy and its use, revealed disproportionate use of CP based on race and other student background characteristics, with Black students being subjected to CP at alarmingly disparate levels. It is likely that the relationship they discovered between state policy use of color-evasive and deficit language and high rates of CP application to minoritized students is evident for other policies concerned with power, control, and discipline, such as those focused on SROs.

In “Constructing an Educational ‘Quality’ Crisis: (E)quality Politics and Racialization Beyond Target Beneficiaries,” McCambly and Mulroy (2024) expertly demonstrate the power of discourse to establish a sense of normalcy. Using CDA, the authors explore the development of the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) and how two concepts, equity and quality, became discursively linked in the administration of higher education policy in 1968 through 1994. Although FIPSE was founded to identify, fund, and disseminate projects to support equity-focused transformations in teaching, learning, and administrative structures within universities, this founding mission drew opposition. Equity became framed as lower standards and backlash efforts as a crusade to save higher education, shifting the social construction of FIPSE’s target population from students of color to higher education institutions. The authors explain that policies aimed at advancing equal educational opportunity in the United States are often met by resistance and sustained backlash. They describe the approach used to shift the purpose of FIPSE as (e)quality politics, which has four stages. First, segregated access to a public good is disrupted. Subsequently, equal access policy is introduced and works to delegitimize the provision of racially targeted goods. This is paired with a negative backlash grounded in loss aversion (e.g., the loss of quality and prestige of U.S. higher education). Finally, “quality-centered” goals are developed and become the dominant concern of the organization tasked with administering equal access. Through this process, policy arguments on educational quality, posed as a racially neutral (i.e., race-evasive) concern, effectively contest and undermine the conferral of resources and power to minoritized communities.

In “Feeling the Threat of Race in Education: Exploring the Cultural Politics of Emotions in CRT-Ban Political Discourses,” Vue et al. (2024) use CDA alongside critical race methodology to offer a critical race discourse analysis (CRDA) of racialized emotions in public policy discourse concerning CRT bans in U.S. education. White people tend to avoid discussing race and racism because it makes them uncomfortable to do so. Yet, by having these discussions and better understanding the role of racism in society and how it impacts policy and practice in schools, we can work to create anti-racist school communities (Diem & Welton, 2021). Vue et al. (2024) explore the connections between racialized emotions occurring in legislative sessions (i.e., public debates among policymakers) and the broader discourse surrounding CRT bans to examine the role they play in how policy is shaped and, ultimately, how curricula and students’ learning experiences are impacted.

Vue et al. (2024) focus their CDA on Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, earlier adopters of anti-CRT legislation that passed anti-CRT legislation within 1 year of Trump’s Executive Order barring federal agencies and contractors from conducting any training on “divisive concepts” or “harmful ideologies” related to race and gender (Exec. Order No. 13950, 2020). Despite CRT not being taught in PK–12 schools, it has been weaponized “by white conservatives to downplay and outright deny the import of race in society” (Pollock et al., 2022; Welton et al., 2023, p. 3), effectively restricting or banning the teaching of race and racism in the classroom (Stout & Wilburn, 2022). Vue et al. (2024) emphasize that attempts and successes to ban CRT are entwined with racialized emotions and the perpetuation of White supremacy, prioritizing White people’s comfort and maintaining “white innocence” through race-evasive language in legislation. Much like critical policy scholars’ argument for the need to look at the roots and development of policy to understand how it emerged, what problem(s) it was intended to solve, how it has changed over time, and how it reinforces the dominant culture (Diem et al., 2014), Vue et al. (2024) also argue that we need to understand the roots of racialized emotions, particularly “the roots of white rage (e.g., capitalism, racism) and its depths in the nation-building project.”

Attributes of Critical Education Policy Research Employed in the Special Issue

While critical policy scholarship has a number of discernible attributes, the methods and frameworks applied are wide-ranging (Diem et al., 2018). In this special issue, we see the use of qualitative interviews, quantitative analysis of national data sets, and the analysis of historical and policy documents. CDA is notably featured in several articles. Dhaliwal and colleagues (2024), for example, use CDA to explore how discourse around CP shapes and is shaped by ideology by seeking to uncover the rationales that are present in education policy and practice. CDA also emphasizes the importance of considering the socio-historical context in language analysis, as exemplified by McCambly and Mulroy (2024), who explore the racialized origins of the quality movement in higher education. This approach allows researchers to explore how language is shaped by and, in turn, shapes social, political, and cultural contexts. It also enables researchers to explore how language then establishes, cultivates, and maintains (or resists) existing power structures and ideologies through its influence on practice, social interactions, and institutions. Vue et al. (2024) engage in what they describe as a close reading of public policy discourse to examine the kinds of emotions that are tacitly endorsed, invited, and animated within racialized politics and their impact.

A number of articles also explored the impact of color- or race-evasive language use in education policy. As Vue et al. (2024) explain, race-evasiveness is the practice of refusing to address racism, including minimizing racism, promoting meritocracy and individualism, and opposing the “special treatment” of certain groups. For example, McCambly and Mulroy (2024) explain that in discussions of educational quality, explicit racial references are often conspicuously absent. In their article exploring the displacement of equity with quality discourse in higher education, they explore how quality proponents avoided mention of race or those who would benefit from an emphasis on equity, focusing instead on the importance of preserving excellence and the study of Western civilization. Although race-evasive discourse and policy are implicitly based on racist consideration, McCamby and Mulroy point out that such assertions are met with pushback and demands for material evidence. As critical policy researchers have demonstrated, however, what is not said within policy and policy discourse is often just as powerful as what is said, and such demands for proof are not only disingenuous but also reinforce epistemic power inequalities (Bonilla-Silva & Ashe, 2014; Harper, 2012; Young, 2003). Vue et al. (2024) referred to this practice as racial gaslighting. Similarly, in their exploration of CP policy, Dhaliwal et al. (2024) argued education policy that used neutral language, such as “unruly,” “threatening,” or “assaultive,” rather than naming race or color, allows the disproportional application of punishment to students of color to be perceived as natural and even necessary. These labels, they argue, are not neutral. Rather, they are “imbued with crime-related meaning and imagery,” the same kinds of meaning and imagery used to dehumanize certain populations and to justify violence in genocide, colonization, and slavery. Vue et al. (2024) found that a race-evasive notion of equity and love was used to support CRT bans in four of the states under investigation. To illustrate, a romanticized notion of loving all equally was used to whitewash or erase systematic mistreatments that indelibly mark minoritized groups.

The notion of imaginary is applied within several of the articles as well. In Zabala-Eisshofer et al.’s (2024) examination of the use of school resource officers, they explained that certain practices, like having an SRO in every school, have become normalized. They are seen as permanent fixtures, and in some states, schools are required to have them. Zabala-Eisshofer and colleagues (2024), however, point out that an image of schools as always having an SRO is constructed, not real. Taking a different approach, Daramola’s (2024) article focuses on the development of imaginaries as tools for effective advocacy; parents in her research created new programs that offer new images of powerful pro-Black education that people understand and fight for. At the same time, CPA scholars should explore tensions within minoritized communities that operate within and beyond neoliberal policy agendas to both call out and call in the intricacies of efforts to disrupt educational inequities and imagine other possibilities.

Finally, several of the articles touch on the issue of parental power. Dhaliwal et al. (2024) explored the inequitable relationship between schools and parents in the power to use CP. The codification of the legal framework in loco parentis in state policies disempowered parents in some states from opting out of CP, and it made it very difficult to bring educators to trial for excessive punishment. Of particular importance to the creation of this power imbalance is the process of naturalization (Fairclough, 1989), in which language is used to condition members of society to accept practices like CP, even when they are not in their best interest. Daramola’s (2024) exploration of two Black community organizations’ efforts to improve educational opportunities for their students also addresses the power dynamics involved in parent advocacy for changes in “the system.”

As the CPA scholars in this issue demonstrate, the realities of students, their families, and the education system require us to connect policy and practice with the histories, community contexts, and overall systems that influence schooling, whether that be, for instance, dark money and politics that support fugitive spaces, (e)quality politics, or organizing efforts against much-needed gun reform. We hope future researchers build on this work to untangle existing tensions tied to these realities as we work to identify critical solutions to educational inequities.

Conclusion

The articles featured in this collection of critical education policy research illustrate the intricate political and policy dynamics that perpetuate profound injustices in our educational systems. A notable concern, as highlighted by Zabala-Eisshofer et al.’s (2024) findings, is the reluctance of some researchers to call out evident injustices in their data, opting instead for status quo recommendations. This underscores the critical importance of embracing a research paradigm that questions assumptions and uses critical approaches to surface what may have otherwise gone unnoticed (Young & Diem, 2017).

Critical education policy research is a paramount endeavor, calling for scholars to engage with and employ critical theories, such as abolitionist frameworks and Black imaginaries (Daramola, 2024). These theoretical lenses can help guide scholarly inquiries and steer study implications toward equitable policy solutions. We also need education researchers to learn and use critical methodologies that unpack how positions, power, emotions, agendas, and discourse perpetuate inequity and inequality (Vue et al., 2024; Young & Diem, 2024). The critical theories and methodologies employed by these researchers reveal how external actors significantly influence practices and policies within educational institutions, demonstrating how schools and universities do not operate in vacuums. Taken together, these researchers uncovered the deep complexities that sustain injustices, offering a pathway to disrupt inequities.

As the field of critical education research continues to evolve and expand into spaces where it was previously sparse, it becomes imperative to reflect on where the field has been so we can envision its future impact on policy and practice for a more just future. We have argued elsewhere that developments in critical education research reflect current conditions of education (Young & Diem, 2017). This is true for the focus of this volume’s research (e.g., CRT bans) and the theoretical frameworks adopted (e.g., CRT). The critical scholars in this special issue underscore the importance of critique in a democratic society (Diem et al., 2014) and offer insights into how policy and practice can be designed to address inequities. Indeed, at a time when education is hyper-political, and universities and PK–12 systems are experiencing intense pushback from the far right about equity-oriented policies and practices, while also still dealing with a movement to privatize education, conducting research in critical ways is vital to tackle the difficult tensions inherent in these realities.