Teacher preparation programmes (TPPs) find many ways to shape the development of their teacher candidates while bridging the research to practice gap in university and school partnerships. Recently, accountability models built on high-stakes standardised student assessments (Value-Added Models [VAM]) have been mandated as a way to evaluate the…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of 2001 increased the stakes for all schools to increase student achievement by mandating all students meet or exceed state standards by 2014. A small rural school responded 5 years ago to their failure to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) by implementing professional learning communities (PLC) as a…

The goal of the RF program, Part B of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), is to have all children reading at grade level by the end of third grade. There is no legislative precedent for this program, focused as it is on preventing reading failure in the early elementary years (US Department of Education, April 2002). Because the design of…

A Friedman Foundation report attempts to find empirical support for the contention that competition from private schools, through voucher programs, improves the effectiveness of public schools. In the first year of Ohio's new EdChoice voucher program, the report claims to have found substantial academic gains at public schools exposed to the…

The Office of Civil Rights (2001) and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Antunez, 2003) mandate that language proficiency and academic achievement be measured in order to provide equal educational opportunities to English language learners and have an accountability system for their language and academic growth. The Cognitive Academic Language…