Educational reforms have occurred throughout the history of public education. In 2009, the federal Race to the Top initiative was born and included many educational reform models. To have these reform models gain traction at the state level, a call was made by the U.S. Department of Education (Race to the Top Program Executive Summary, 2009) for…

Professional learning for teachers has become a staple in today's education continuous improvement system. Federal programs such as the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Program (RTTT), Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, Elementary and Secondary Education Act and others have supported funds over the years to account for developing…

In 2012, the United States Department of Education announced the Race to the Top-District grants. One joint award was made to two large educational cooperatives in the same state that together represented 111 mostly rural schools in 22 districts. One of the grant's identified four essential projects was the implementation of personalized learning.…

The state of Florida has taken an unprecedented approach to teacher professional development in its Race to the Top (RTTT) Program application by proposing to promote an international innovation that originates in Japan, "lesson study," as a statewide teacher professional development model. Since winning the US$700 million RTTT funding…

With the federal initiatives of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, many school districts are employing literacy coaching in their quest to improve reading test scores. This study seeks sought to understand teachers' perceptions of literacy coaching to answer this primary research question: "What meanings do teachers make of literacy…

There has been a sea change in teacher evaluation over the past eight years. Inspired in part by President Barack Obama's policies, schools have instituted teacher evaluation systems that include multiple measures of teacher impact. Model systems are aligned to systems of continuous improvement, helping teachers identify areas of weakness in their…

This quantitative study investigated the relationship between teacher dispositions, subject content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and reasons that school principals recommend non-renewal of teachers' contracts. Nearly 2,000 school principals in 13 states completed an emailed survey. In deciding whether to non-renew a teacher contract,…

The purpose of this study was to examine and compare key elements of the actions that states in the USA and Australia took to implement the Common Core State Standards or Phase One of the Australian Curriculum, and what processes and products they used to facilitate implementation of these innovations. A rubric adapted from a diagnostic tool,…

The intention of this qualitative study was to explore the effects that instructional data systems have on a building level leader's capacity to evaluate student growth and inform principal practice. Principal leadership practices were examined through the lens of Kouzes and Postners' five practices of exemplary leadership (Kouzes & Posner,…