2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

By April 2026, large government employers, including major state higher education institutions, must ensure all digital materials comply with accessibility standards. As I worked to develop strategic support for educators in my department navigating this mandate, I found myself searching for a theoretical framework to make sense of what I was observing. The challenge wasn't just technical—it was deeply human and organizational. Educators (faculty, pre-doctoral instructors, adjunct faculty, and part-time lecturers) operate under diverse employment contracts, exercise significant freedom to modify course materials, and can face practical constraints that make attending training workshops difficult, let alone finding time to implement what they've learned. Add to this the disciplinary differences in how courses are taught, and the implementation picture becomes remarkably complex.

Street-level bureaucracy theory emerged as surprisingly relevant to understanding these dynamics. After consulting with sociology colleagues who confirmed its reputable standing in policy research (even being used to support national conversations about research security), I turned to the engineering education literature expecting to find applications. Instead, a search of the PEER repository revealed no instances of this concept. Even Google Scholar showed minimal connections between street-level bureaucracy and engineering education. This absence felt significant.

Street-level bureaucracy theory, developed by Michael Lipsky, recognizes that frontline workers like educators exercise considerable discretion in implementing policies, effectively becoming de facto policymakers through their daily decisions. The theory additionally attends to a variety of situational features to surface the work of being a street level bureaucrat: chronic resource scarcity, high demand and caseloads, vague or conflicting goals, performance measures that don't capture the work, and high discretion in practice. This usefully described what I was witnessing: educators being acknowledged as the primary interface between the demands and enactment of the federal accessibility mandate, and conflicting ideas about how to support the on the ground reality. As I learned more about the theory and reflected on other policy work that affects engineering education (academic integrity policies, ABET accreditation standards, the current sticky situation around AI policy), my sense of the potential usefulness of this theory grew into this proposed ASEE paper. .

This paper will introduce street-level bureaucracy theory and use selected examples to illustrate its applications, with particular attention to teaching and higher education contexts. The paper "Street-Level Educators: The Selective Recognition of Students and Invisible TA Labor" is an example. The paper will then explore three sites where this theory may support sense making and action: the April 2026 ADA accessibility mandate, the work of ABET accreditation, and the evolving challenges of AI policy articulation and implementation.

The intended contributions are threefold: the work aims to bridge engineering education research with policy studies; surface the often-invisible labor conditions shaping educator work (connecting to scholarship on faculty burnout); and position engineering education as a series of design problems where policies shape but don't fully constrain practice. Understanding educators as street-level bureaucrats may help us develop more realistic, sustainable approaches to educational change. Toward such an ambitious possibility, my goal is to make it easier for those in the engineering education community to assess whether this theoretical lens might prove useful in their own scholarly or practical endeavors.