Doctoral Programs in Educational Leadership: A Duality Framework of Commonality and Differences

In recent years, doctoral programs in education leadership have been subject to notable criticism and proposals for reform

Over-Due Process Revisions for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

Over-Due Process Revisions for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Ac

The Remedial Authority of Hearing and Review Officers under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: An Update

This article provides an update of a comprehensive review that was published five years ago, which synthesized the various sources of law specific to the remedial authority of hearing/review officers (H/ROs) under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

Judicial Review of Teacher-School Board Grievance Arbitration: An Extended Empirical Analysis

In recent years, the overall state law framework for teacher-school board collective bargaining has undergone limited revisions. The basic distribution has been that approximately two-thirds of the state laws authorize collective bargaining for public school teachers, with the remaining state laws either silent or prohibitive. During the past fifteen years, a few states have curtailed or eliminated their applicable laws, with the leading respective examples being Wisconsin and Tennessee, and at least one state, Virginia, shifting in favor of collective bargaining. The courts have added few direct revisions. The Supreme Court’s ruling that agency shop provisions in public sector collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) violate the First Amendment poses an indirect effect in terms of teacher union membership. The majority of these state laws that provide for teacher-board collective bargaining include grievance procedures as mandatory subjects of bargaining. Yet, despite its importance as the culminating, binding, and third-party step in the grievance process under CBAs, teacher-board arbitration has received scant scholarly attention. Although an occasional study has examined grievance arbitration awards for one or more issues within the public school sector, judicial review of teacher-school board grievance arbitration has largely escaped recent and systematic scholarship. The purpose of this article is to synthesize and update the previous limited line of empirical analyses of court rulings specific to grievance arbitration under a teacher-school board CBA. The first part provides the legal backdrop for this empirical analysis. The second part reviews the pertinent previous research. The final part reports and discusses the updated findings for the seventeen-year period from 2006 through to the end of 2022

The Legal Boundaries for Impartiality of IDEA Hearing Officers: An Update

Special education has become a significant area of litigation in the K-12 school context. The impartial hearing officer (“IHO”) is the fulcrum of the adjudicative process under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (“IDEA”). However, the IDEA only provides for two standards for impartiality while the framework of remaining standards are left—via the IDEA’s structure of “cooperative federalism”—to state laws. Ultimately, the courts serve as the chief cartographer for the legal boundaries of IDEA IHO impartiality in their interpretation, gap-filling, and application of the federal and state framework. The previous research relating at least in part to IDEA IHO impartiality is notably limited in date, location, and focus. In the predecessor of the present analysis, Maher and Zirkel synthesized the cumulative court decisions, RO decisions, and federal agency interpretations as of 2007 into a checklist template consisting of a table that in its rows identified various specific categories that had arisen in this cumulative body of law. The purpose of this article is to provide an update of the Maher and Zirkel case law analysis, with limited appropriate adjustments. Overall, this update shows that the impartiality of IHOs under the IDEA merits further customization so as to facilitate the prompt completion of the hearing process