Accountability efforts under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has brought greater attention to school-level processes and practices and their impact on student outcomes. This has pushed states to report more school-level inputs, including per-pupil expenditures. Grounded in an open systems theory (OST) framework, we identify the association…

In their nascent stages, charter schools formed under competing ideologies. In academic circles, charter schools were envisioned as pedagogical laboratories that would allow for educator- and community-driven school improvement. In other circles, charter schools emerged as a free-market reform driven by accountability, choice, and growth. Amid the…

Subject departments are an increasingly important unit of analysis for research on schools and beginning teachers' experiences. By analysing a practice-based typology of eight departmental types through an exploratory factor analysis of questionnaires completed by beginning teachers (n = 55), the authors refined the typology to four (hierarchical;…

Supervised agricultural experiences (SAE) have been a core tenet of school-based agricultural education. Despite this, limited evidence has existed regarding the best practices associated with facilitating quality student learning for SAEs at the middle school level. In response, we used self-regulated learning as a lens to examine this…

A growing body of research distinguishes between official systems of accountability and "felt" accountability - how people feel responsible to one another across a web of complex, intersecting relationships. Research in the behavioral sciences suggests that while such feelings have a dramatic effect on results, these have been…

This study explored the phenomenon of collective leader efficacy and its potential influence on principal perceptions of self-efficacy with high school leaders in rural school districts. Research shows that school leaders have a positive impact on student achievement and the overall culture and climate of a building (Waters et al., 2004). Yet,…

Based on the theoretical approaches of social capital and institutional trust, this paper seeks to identify contextual factors and conditions behind teacher behaviours which aim to alter the results of standardised tests in the Italian low-stakes accountability system. Numerous studies report significant factors associated with student cheating,…

Positive student behavior is necessary, not only for a positive school culture, but for learning to take place, as students cannot learn in an environment where they do not feel safe, physically and/or emotionally, just as teachers cannot teach to the best of their ability. This qualitative phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of…

This paper reports on a qualitative study which investigated teachers' explanations for changes to their practice over time. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 teachers from two states in the Northeastern United States of America, asking them to reflect on changes to their practice. These teachers were mostly…

This qualitative study explored the perceptions of five high school science teachers to understand how the alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment within the instructional program was perceived as purposeful to student learning in the age of accountability and the standards movement. A conceptual framework including alignment and…

Background: To inform prevention strategies, this study provides incidence, factors, and actions taken when a suspected concussion occurred in K-12 schools in Utah. Methods: Data were collected using Utah's Student Injury Reporting System (SIRS) from the academic years 2011-2012 to 2018-2019. SIRS is a unique online system that tracks injuries…

A Dissertation in Practice was conducted which connected theories of action and Yosso's (2015) community cultural wealth framework to address the absence of diverse parental perspectives and oversight at Freedom Middle School in South Texas. Platicas with seven parent volunteers and a parent engagement survey available to all Freedom Middle School…

Undergirded by "economic theory of the principal-agent problem", the study investigated secondary school teachers' perception of the influence of large-scale testing accountability on teaching and learning. Cross-sectional survey design was used. Simple random sampling was also employed to select 200 teachers for this study. The…

In this small, mixed methods pilot study twenty-three 5th graders and two 6th graders from a large, urban middle school in the Northeast United States were given Accountable Talk (AT) sentence stems to use during a series of academically productive talk (APT) in their science classrooms over a 2-week period in the Spring of 2024. The goal of the…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex relationships between educational policy and classroom practice. By employing a sociocultural perspective, we examine formulations inscribed in socio-material artifacts about what students should learn and how they should engage with knowledge. We explore how these formulations are mobilized in…