City Colleges of Chicago undergo policy changes. In 2010, a reform sought to install accountability and transition City Colleges of Chicago into compliance with government funding requests through Reinvention. Reinvention, in the public view, was hailed as a necessity for a system that could not sustain on its own. It used a shock-system…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) cemented a standardized testing assessment culture in the United States but research has highlighted the inequities (Au, 2020; Dixon, 1978; Grodsky et al., 2008; Khan, 2020; Moses & Nanna, 2007), unreliability (Hunt et al., 2010; Pizmony-Levy & Green Saraisky, 2016) and negative impacts (Berryhill et al., 2009;…

Students designated as English learners (ELs) make up a substantial and growing portion of the K-12 population in the U.S., so all teachers should expect, at some point, to be teachers of language learners and will need to address the complexities of managing a multilingual classroom. This management is considered classroom-level educational…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was enacted as an education intervention to close the achievement gap by increasing student attendance, graduation, and standard testing rates. NCLB held teachers and administrators accountable for successfully meeting adequate yearly progress gains. However, the emerging NCLB research uncovered a culture of…

Confusion among school leaders regarding how to interpret and implement special education legislation, and specific federal and state policies and mandates such as a free and appropriate public education (FAPE), in the least restrictive environment (LRE) at the school-site level has existed since the 1970s and continues to exist. This…

Nested within a 5-year examination of Teach for America (TFA) corps members' experiences with learning to teach, this article focuses on the salient theme of "Reform Models" found in data collected when a highly publicized testing cheating scandal was breaking in this urban district. Using constructivist grounded theory, researchers…

Although the Common Core standards do not prescribe pedagogy or forbid playful learning, kindergarten teachers will find it challenging to maintain a playful classroom under this reform. Kindergarten teachers have to cover a more rigorous and accelerated curriculum now, and they are doing so in a context that rewards procedural teaching.

Over the last decade, accountability reform has been at the forefront of the domestic policy agenda. Although the Obama Administration was critical of some elements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), its policies endorsed high-stakes testing and expanded the scope of the stakes. With the Race to the Top and an NCLB waiver process, the administration…

At the beginning of the last decade, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002. Key provisions of this act focused on holding schools accountable to ensure that all students met state established standards. In Virginia, the state Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments form the basis of…

As the "No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001" and high-stakes accountability have come to define the work of teachers, one wonders if "teaching" is becoming more or less attractive. Teaching in today's classrooms is arguably very different from teaching in classrooms from previous decades and generations. Moreover, the…

This study sought to determine the effectiveness on increasing student achievement of principals trained in a traditional principal preparation program and those trained in an alternate route principal preparation program within the same Mississippi university. Sixty-six Mississippi principals and assistant principals participated in the study. Of…

Assessment permeates many aspects of our educational society. With the passage of federal legislation (i.e., No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004), assessment in the form of accountability is ever present in our K-12 educational system. Current assessment practices should be used in…

The purpose of this study was to examine elementary teachers' perceptions of the effectiveness of Response to Intervention (RTI) and Teacher Support Team (TST) within a Mississippi Gulf Coast school district. RTI models have gained popularity within the national education system. Schools are encouraged to implement RTI in efforts to improve the…

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, federal law requires schools to demonstrate yearly progress toward academic proficiency. Data have shown that students with special needs often achieve higher levels of academic growth in inclusive classrooms than in special education classrooms. Furthermore, studies have also suggested…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of explicitly differentiated reading instruction groups on eighth-grade students' achievement, behavior, and engagement in a school seeking to reestablish adequate yearly progress benchmarks. The results of this study supported student participation in explicitly differentiated reading…