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…

Using a paired national cross-section of third grade teacher and principal Schools and Staffing Survey data from 2007 to 2008, comparisons were made regarding teachers' and elementary principals' reports of instructional time distributions for English Language Arts, mathematics, science, social studies, and reading in third grade during a full…

By means of data from the most comprehensive source of teacher data in the nation, Schools and Public School Teacher Staffing Survey (SASS), we designed a follow-up quantitative study to test the effects of two decades of national policy mandates on instructional time allotments for core academic subjects. We used data from the SASS data from…

There is much debate over the impact of high stakes testing as well as a growing body of research focused on both the intended and unintended consequences of these tests. One claim of both the popular media and education researchers is that high stakes tests have led to curricular narrowing--the idea that school time is increasingly allocated to…

This study seeks to empirically ground the debate over mathematics and science teacher shortages and evaluate the extent to which there is, or is not, sufficient supply of teachers in these fields. The authors' analyses of nationally representative data from multiple sources show that math and science are the fields most difficult to staff, but…

The proportion of time that elementary school teachers use to teach core academic subjects (English/reading/language arts, mathematics, social studies, science) is an important aspect of instruction. Spending a large proportion of time teaching core curriculum subjects may be important not only in terms of school quality, but also in terms of…