ExpandED: Broadening the Understanding of Contemporary Issues in Education and Policy

The Texas Tech University Educational Leadership Policy faculty in collaboration with the Center for Innovative Research in Change, Leadership, and Education (CIRCLE) invite you to join us for our virtual brown bag series, “ExpandED: Broadening the Understanding of Contemporary Issues in Education and Policy.” Featuring researchers from the College of Education and various institutions across the country, the aim of this series is to bring together students, faculty, and researchers at Texas Tech and beyond to disseminate knowledge that is of immediate relevance to educational leadership and policy and facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas across multiple institutions.

This year, audiences from across the country will gather virtually to engage with speakers on topics related to policy evaluation and open-science research practices, evolutions and social constructions of education policy over time, and empirical research noting the barriers and challenges to providing equitable educational opportunities for historically marginalized students.

To access recordings of all previous ExpandED talks, please visit the webinars page linked here.

Schedule and Summary of 2025-26 Talks

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Why Rural Matters for Education in Texas

June 6^th, 2025, 11:00 a.m.

If you viewed the session (live or recorded), we invite you to a brief survey: https://forms.gle/wLGwRF8PZzMs6f6A8

Nearly 700,000 students in Texas attend rural schools, yet the needs of rural schools are often neglected in state and national policy. In this conversation, we will share the most recent data about the state of rural schools in Texas, drawn from the national Why Rural Matters report, and summarize some of the key policy issues for rural education, from school choice and vouchers to teacher shortages and staffing. This session will examine why place matters for education policy making and offer Critical Rural Policy Analysis as a framework.

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Caring School and District Leadership: Findings and Recommendations for Research, Policy, and Practice

October 7^th, 2025, 12:00 p.m.

Register via Zoom

Care. Love. Social-emotional well-being. These are important concepts in K-12 schools, with a robust empirical body of research to guide leaders in educational systems. In this session, we will explore the research base on care in education. I will share recent research-based practices that support care and social-emotional well-being in school systems, drawing on case study examples. Recommendations for researchers and practitioners will be shared, along with a discussion of research gaps and possibilities for more caring school systems.

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What do school boards do anyway? An NLP-Based Analysis of School Board Meeting Minutes at Scale

October 21^st, 2025, 12:00 p.m.

Register via Zoom

Despite the authority granted to school boards, research on their day-to-day functioning has long lagged behind scholarship on other aspects of American education. While decades of qualitative case studies and governance theory have offered important hypotheses about what school boards should do, there remains limited large-scale evidence on what they actually do in practice or how their actions vary across geographic, demographic, or academic lines. This research addresses that gap through a natural language processing (NLP) analysis of more than 40,000 meeting minutes spanning four years (2018 to 2022) and 500 public school districts across the United States.

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School Leadership Decision-making and Student Achievement Under Student-Based Budgeting: Evidence from an Urban School District

Feb 17^th, 2026, 12:00 p.m.

Register via Zoom

Over the past three decades, around 20 school districts across the United States have adopted a school finance and governance reform referred to as student-based budgeting (SBB). SBB consists of two parts: the adoption of a weighted student funding formula that allocates dollars to schools based on student counts and characteristics and site-based budgeting. This approach aims to more equitably distribute resources by providing increased funding for subgroups such as English language learners and special education students. It also empowers school leaders to meet the needs of their students by giving them flexibility in how to budget their school’s funding. In this talk, I present evidence of the impact of additional funding on student outcomes provided by SBB. Additionally, using data from interviews with school leaders in the district, I also discuss how principals approach their new budgeting role and their perceptions of the policy.

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Signaling Early Interest: The Effects of High School Education Courses on Teacher Outcomes

Feb 24^th, 2026, 12:00 p.m.

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States have incentivized school districts to implement education courses and extracurricular activities in their high schools as a strategy to grow interest in the teaching profession. In this study, we estimate the impact of access to high school education courses on the probability of becoming a teacher by leveraging the staggered rollout of these courses across Texas high schools from 2005 to 2015 using a difference-in-differences design. Although individuals who take high school education courses are four times more likely to become a teacher, we find no evidence that exposure to these courses increases the probability of becoming a teacher. This suggests that enrolling in high school education courses is more of a signal of early interest in the teaching profession rather than a means to induce individuals to become teachers. We then describe who enrolls in high school education courses and examine the placements, retention, and effectiveness of teachers who enrolled in these courses while they were in high school to better understand the role of early interest in teaching in teacher outcomes.

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A Warm Welcome: The Impact of Newcomer School Choice on Student Educational Outcomes

March 31^st, 2026, 12:00 p.m.

Register via Zoom

The U.S. has seen an unprecedented influx of migrants over the past decade, particularly among school-aged children. Newly arrived immigrant adolescents—referred to as newcomer students—often face limited school choices due to marginalization related to language proficiency, race/ethnicity, poverty, and, in many cases, trauma. Newcomer programs are designed to provide a transitional environment that supports immigrant adolescents in developing English language skills, addressing socioemotional and mental health needs, and integrating socially into American life. Using administrative data on newcomer students from a large, diverse urban school district in Texas, and applying descriptive and instrumental variable methods, this study estimates the impact of enrolling in a full-day, separate-site newcomer program on student outcomes. We find that enrollment in a newcomer school has strong positive effects on English language acquisition, as measured by state test scores and reclassification rates, and strong negative effects on school disciplinary incidents. These findings suggest that newcomer programs may be a promising strategy for supporting English language development and promoting the successful integration of immigrant youth into U.S. schools.