Place Is Not Background: The Inaugural Issue of the Journal of Spatial Equity and Education

Rajah E. Smart, Ed.D. Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Spatial Equity and Education; Director, Tennessee Educational Funding and Policy

It is my privilege to announce the publication of Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of Spatial Equity and Education (JSEE), the inaugural issue of a journal built on a single conviction: place is not the backdrop against which policy happens. Place is a variable. It carries information, it distributes costs and benefits unevenly, and it echoes long after the decision that created it has faded from memory.

That conviction has a name in our work: the Spatial Echo, and the Sender–Receiver framework that structures it. A decision made in one place is sent; it is received somewhere else, by someone else, often years later and usually by people who had no seat at the table when it was made. A siting decision, a funding formula, a boundary line, a remediation schedule: each of these transmits. JSEE exists to study the transmission.

What the journal covers

JSEE is an annual, double-blind peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by Tennessee Educational Funding and Policy (TNEFP), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institute. We charge no article processing fees to authors and place no paywall in front of readers. Research about who bears the cost of where things are built should not itself be a thing you have to be well-resourced to read.

Our scope is deliberately wide, because the phenomenon is: how place shapes education, health, work, safety, and fiscal policy. In practice, that means we publish work on school finance and the geography of fiscal instability; infrastructure siting and the spatial economics of the digital build-out; environmental conditions and the learning environments they sit inside; access programming and the distance — literal and structural — between students and postsecondary opportunity; and state-level policy analysis that takes seriously the fact that a state is not a single place.

The inaugural issue carries five peer-reviewed articles across that terrain. They are methodologically varied: quantitative spatial analysis, systematic review, policy and fiscal analysis, and they share a common instinct: to ask not only what a policy does, but where it lands and on whom.

Thank you

An inaugural issue is a coordination problem disguised as a publication. There is no prior year to copy, no template to inherit, no institutional memory to lean on. Everything has to be decided for the first time, and on a deadline.

My deepest thanks go to the JSEE editorial board, our Managing Editor and our Associate Editors in medical education policy, policy and implementation, and STEM education, who took on a journal that did not yet exist and treated it from day one as though it already had a reputation to protect.

And to our peer reviewers: thank you. You returned substantive, detailed reviews on compressed timelines, without sacrificing depth for speed. The volume of feedback was genuinely striking, and its quality was even better. Line-level engagement with argument, method, and evidence was offered generously and without condescension. Reviewers are the invisible labor of scholarly publishing. This issue exists because of yours. Double-blind review means I cannot name you here, which is precisely why I want to say plainly that the strength of these five articles is substantially your doing.

What we learned

We made the deadline. We also learned a great deal on the way to it, and we intend to carry all of it forward.

We learned that production is a discipline in its own right, and that decisions about typesetting, figure standards, and file architecture are best made early and in writing. We learned that reference reconciliation is not a final polish step but a threshold gate, and we have moved it accordingly. We learned how much clearer a review timeline becomes when the decision architecture behind it is explicit. And we learned that the editorial standards worth having are the ones you hold when it would be easier not to. We also learned that artificial intelligence is real, and while we are not against it, we will adopt standards for the next issue.

Volume 2 will be better for it. Some of that improvement will be visible to readers as a more refined published article. Most of it will be invisible, which is how infrastructure is supposed to work.

Read the issue

Volume 1, Issue 1 shall be available in full and without charge at jsee.scholasticahq.com. Every article carries a registered DOI and is permanently open access.

• Print ISSN 3071-4982 | Online ISSN 3071-4990

• DOI prefix 10.66981

• Published by Tennessee Educational Funding and Policy

Submit to Volume 2

We will be reading for Volume 2 in January. We welcome empirical, methodological, and policy-analytic manuscripts that treat place as a variable rather than a control. We are particularly interested in work that follows a decision from where it was made to where it was received.

All submissions are handled through Scholastica and reviewed in a double-blind manner. Authors building on the Spatial Echo / Sender–Receiver framework are asked to include explicit attribution; the framework originates with R. E. Smart and TNEFP. All empirical work published in JSEE must rely on strictly public-use data.

Questions, submissions, and inquiries: info@tnefp.org

Thank you for reading. This is the first issue. It will not be the best one.