Implementation of the curriculum-centered, standards-based federally mandated reform, No Child Left Behind, has placed pressure on teachers, particularly those working in schools comprised of highly diverse and impoverished students, to have their students attain predetermined levels on high stakes, standardized tests. When schools have not met…

Program Improvement (PI) and School Assistance and Intervention Teams (SAIT) programs place rigorous, narrowly defined requirements upon monitored schools and districts, with corrective actions typically written as both school-level and district-level interventions. The requirements, known as the Essential Program Components, aim to enable schools…

This article presents a progress report on urban school districts' efforts to execute the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act, a law they greeted with both hope and fear due to the sanctions it authorized against failing systems. To investigate their progress, the Council of the Great City Schools conducted a survey of its 60 member urban…