This dissertation investigates the factors contributing to low student engagement in a Title I school located in Southeast Texas. Recognizing the critical importance of student engagement for academic success, the study employs a qualitative phenomenological approach to explore teachers' perceptions of the underlying causes of disengagement within…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act mandates that all school districts provide a free appropriate public education to students with Individualized Education Plans in their least restrictive environment. Co-teaching in inclusion classrooms is a collaborative effort, with a general education teacher and a special education teacher, to…

After the passage of "No Child Left Behind," and especially after Obama-era Race to the Top initiatives, rising accountability for improved achievement and widespread dissatisfaction with the instructional value of statewide test reports led many school districts to purchase computer-adaptive "interim" testing systems. A common…

One goal of standards-based accountability is to align educator behaviors with the improvement of student achievement. Yet, prior work suggests that standards-based accountability has negatively affected some educational processes, such as narrowing the curriculum and reducing instructional quality. Panel data from middle grades math teachers…

The 10th anniversary of Common Core's launch offers the opportunity to take stock of the impact these nearly national standards have had on student learning, as well as their future prospects. In this article, Morgan Polikoff shares his view that the standards movement in general, and Common Core in particular, have achieved all they are going to…

The Common Core State Standards, released in 2010, were rapidly adopted by more than 40 states. Champions maintained that these rigorous standards would transform American education, but the initiative went on to encounter a bumpy path. A decade on, what are we to make of this ambitious effort? What kind of impact, if any, has it had on the…

In California, at the time of this study, the CAHSEE determined if a student will graduate with a high school diploma or receive a certificate of completion of high school requirements. Although students may have completed all their high school credits, if they do not pass the CAHSEE, then the student will not receive a high school diploma or a…

Paul Jablon's "The Synergy of Inquiry" (2014) is well-timed. The 2014 deadline set by No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002) for universal student proficiency has come and gone, and according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, "proficiency rates last year were below 50 percent for nearly every racial and ethnic group, in…

Connecticut's Skills Checklist was developed in response to federal policy that requires all students with significant cognitive disabilities participate in state assessments and be included in measures of adequate yearly progress. Test developers had high expectations for this assessment. In addition to its function as an accountability measure,…

The 2004-05 school year didn't start off well for the Sanger Unified School District. The district, located east of Fresno, had entered its first year of "program improvement"--a gentler way of saying that Sanger was among the 98 lowest-performing districts in the state based on success criteria in the No Child Left Behind law. The…

This quantitative and qualitative study sought to examine the factors that teachers in a poor socio-economic, high-minority, urban, inner-city school district determined were important when gauging their effectiveness in the classroom. The study focused on the selection of specific factors by approximately seventy-five teachers from seven of eight…

Correlational analysis of two years of classroom observation indicates relationships between technology use and various classroom characteristics, including teacher roles and instructional strategies. Three observers used the ISTE Classroom Observation Tool (ICOT) to record 144 observations of classrooms participating in a variety of educational…

As the 2013-2014 school year approaches, more and more schools across the United States are finding it problematic to meet the annual measurable objective of 100 percent of the school's population meeting its adequate yearly progress (AYP) target, as prescribed by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of 2002. Pursuant to NCLB,…

Observation measures of instructional quality tend to fall into two broad categories--those for use across subject areas and those intended for use in specific subject areas. The move toward content-specific measures is a result of research suggesting that effective teaching looks different across subject areas and that both content knowledge and…

This non-experimental, correlational study looked at the relationship between bureaucratic structures in middle and high schools in bringing about change in individual teacher classroom instructional practices through the centralized directive of membership in a professional learning community. Using a continuum of bureaucratic structure, from…