Although U.S. schools that provide bilingual education typically must negotiate English-only policies and pressures to sustain their programming over time, little is known about what this entails at the individual school level. Our research examines in detail how the leaders of an elementary school in New York City with a Spanish-English…

Historically, formative assessment has been credited with increasing student achievement. Student outcomes increase when constructive, immediate, formative feedback is provided in a systematic way for all students. Educators need to implement effective formative assessments in order to deepen learning through more critical thinking and reflection.…

Since the "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB) was formally signed into law more than a decade ago, school reform efforts in the United States have been shaped by a neoliberal ideology that has exacted a tremendous toll on students, teachers, and teacher educators. Because the majority of the preservice teachers currently entering the…

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, data-driven decision making has become one of the central foci in schools in their attempt to attain and maintain adequate levels of student academic performance. The importance of early childhood education is well established with language and literacy proficiency in the early years being viewed as a…

Given the importance of federal legislation in combating educational inequities, particularly those in reading development, the identification of specific school-based variables that contribute to reading proficiency for struggling readers is paramount. While federal education policy, such as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (2002)…

Alarmed by the possibility of social studies being overlooked in this context of new national disciplinary standards, National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools convened a meeting of 15 national organizations representing civics, economics, geography, and history, to begin a conversation about…

This report highlights states' school accountability systems, with an eye on the states that include a measure of student growth in their accountability system. For each state, the report includes: (1) Proficiency measures; (2) Growth measures; and (3) Additional measures such as graduation and dropout rates. The report also provides an overview…

High stakes accountability has intensified the marginalization of social studies in public schools. A popular response to the dilemma between raising achievement in English Language Arts and preserving social studies is to integrate the two subjects. This qualitative case study analyzes instruction in a fifth grade urban classroom where the…

Schools in the United States are making curricular changes from kindergarten through college to meet the Common Core State Standards' demands for higher expectations in reading and writing. As they make these important changes, however, they need not overturn all that they learned about effective reading pedagogy during No Child Left Behind…

National and state assessment data indicate that Hispanic students in American schools lag behind their peers in reading. Schools are struggling to meet the educational challenges of the Hispanic subgroup of students. Effective strategies and intervention tools need to be determined. Though the issue has been identified and schools under the…

Literacy is one of the most critical components of academic success, but the majority of students are leaving high school without the reading and writing skills needed to succeed in college and a career. According to ACT, fewer than 40 percent of black and Latino students are ready for college-level reading when they graduate from high school.…

In this article, I first take on the issue of standards and the degree to which they do or do not contribute to the improvement of language and literacy outcomes for children in multilingual societies. Then I consider the relation of standards to language and, finally, raise the vexed issue of content knowledge and its relation to standards, on…

This research study examines the impact of teacher research on participants in a large-scale educational reform initiative in the United States, No Child Left Behind, and its strand for reading teachers, Reading First. Reading First supported professional development for teachers in order to increase student scores on standardized tests. The…

NCLB and Reading First are negotiated in implementing beginning reading instruction. The article describes and analyzes how two critical conditions for creating opportunity--access to qualified teachers and rigorous academic curriculum--are met by examining the enactment and adaptation of a prescriptive core reading program disproportionately…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…