Background/Context: This qualitative study investigates teachers' perspectives on providing inclusive services for students with complex support needs. Using a Disability Studies in Education (DSE) framework, the research focuses on understanding the challenges and strategies associated with promoting inclusive education, with attention to issues…

Background/Context: In the field of education, the lens of agency has provided a valuable conceptual alternative to deterministic portrayals of schools as oppressive institutions where teachers and students have little power over the conditions in which they teach and learn. A number of studies have investigated teacher and student agency, but few…

Background/Context: Schools are increasingly using scripted curricula that limit teacher autonomy. These limitations are exacerbated when scripted curricula are enacted in fully standardized, asynchronous online course environments with no mechanisms for student--teacher communication. Purpose: This study extends understanding of how teacher…

Background: Research suggests a number of benefits from teacher participation in school improvement--chief among them that it can increase teacher receptivity to innovation and reform adoption. Improvement science has been put forward as a new paradigm for involving local school stakeholders in the improvement process. Purpose: We describe the…

Background/Context: Many schools no longer track classes to increase access to courses at all levels, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. However, informal processes can "de facto" track students, placing them at the same level across subjects. Research shows that de facto tracking is prevalent in…

Background/context: In an era of accountability and standardization, elementary social studies is consistently losing its curricular foothold to English/language arts, math, and science instruction. Purpose: This article examines the relationship between elementary teachers' perceptions of instructional autonomy, teaching context, state testing…

Background & Purpose: This article focuses on the current educational reform movement in New York State resulting from the state's receipt of $700 million in Race to the Top (RTTT) money. Specifically, the article will focus on one aspect of the RTTT requirement, which requires that school districts develop teacher accountability systems that…

Background/Context: More than a century before modern controversies over scripted instruction, the Froebelian kindergarten--the original kindergarten method designed by Friedrich Froebel--and Maria Montessori's pedagogy were criticized for rigidly prescribing how teachers taught and children learned. Today, scripted methods such as Direct…

Background/Context: Teachers affect student performance through their interaction with students in the context of the classrooms and schools where teaching and learning take place. Although it is widely assumed that supportive working conditions improve the quality of instruction and teachers' willingness to remain in a school, little is known…

Background: Support for small schools, and specifically for the creation of small, autonomous schools of choice, has grown considerably in the past decade--particularly in the context of urban schooling. Funded by private and public monies, small-school initiatives have been implemented in most of the nation's city school districts and have become…

Background/Context: Increasingly, instructional reforms in US schools place teachers in differentiated roles, such as literacy coach or data analyst. Not only do these roles hold promise for reforming instruction, but they also may make the teaching career more rewarding by offering teachers new challenges over time. In the past, teachers who held…

Background/Context: In response to state-level test-based accountability and the federal No Child Left Behind Act, school administrators increasingly view centralized curriculum and prescribed instructional strategies as the most direct means of increasing student performance. This movement toward standardization reduces teachers' autonomy and…

The author argues that, for many teacher actions, personal reasons are subordinate to external standards and that the scope of these actions is broader than assumed. People in a professional role must ask whether their actions and general dispositions conform to given standards and goals. (MT)

A strong conservative current underlies much of what is currently said about authority in schooling. Educational authority should be rooted in the ideal of democratic social transformation, a function it cannot have when conceived of more narrowly in terms of institutional heirarchy and stability. (CB)

Teachers are in the awkward position of exercising authority, yet have dubious control over the conditions within which they do so. The ideal teacher role is authority exercised in good faith and a commitment to the burdens and uncertainties of educational authority. (CB)