This study takes advantage of natural variation in alignment and accountability to analyze educator sensemaking of a complex policy environment. It describes how educators in two large, high-accountability districts in New York and Florida made sense of multiple policy changes, including new standards, curriculum, assessments, and teacher…

Teacher evaluation policies have been central to policy efforts to enhance teaching quality. At the same time, ambitious mathematics instruction has been emphasized by teacher education programs as well as by the Common Core State Standards. Drawing on observation and survey data from early-career teachers, this study examines how teachers'…

Over the past 60 years, the federal government has paid much attention to and devoted resources for combating reading failure for children in the United States. Several policies have been enacted over time, from the Reading Excellence Act of 1985, to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, to the adoption of the Common Core State Standards in 2010.…

This research examines how the U.S. newspapers portrayed the Common Core State Standards between 2010-2017. Lexical choices and discursive strategies in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were identified using the Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies framework (Partington & Marchi, 2018; Reisigl, 2018). As a diachronic study focusing…

This study examines how a large metropolitan district presented the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to its teachers, how secondary literacy teachers took up those messages, and the conceptions of equity that were represented at the district and teacher levels. This study draws on sensemaking theory and conceptions of equity in conjunction with…

Background/Context: As a major area of civic decision making, public education is a central arena for advocacy groups seeking to influence policy debates. An emerging body of research examines advocates' use of social media. While debates about policy can be thought of as a clash of large ideas contained within frames, cognitive linguists note…

Do Americans hold a consistent set of opinions about their public schools and how to improve them? From 2013 to 2018, over 5,000 unique respondents participated in more than one consecutive iteration of the annual, nationally representative "Education Next" poll, offering an opportunity to examine individual-level attitude stability on…

Coherence among components of an instructional system is key to changing teachers' instructional practices in standards-based reforms. Coherence involves working across traditional silos--or system components (e.g., curriculum, professional learning, assessment)--to integrate components to avoid fragmentation of experiences for educators and…

Does the experience of teaching in low-income schools through Teach for America (TFA) affect individuals' views on education policy and reform? And if so, how? For this article, the authors surveyed TFA applicants for the 2007-15 cohorts to find out. The survey targeted the set of applicants who had advanced to the competitive program's final…

This article introduces Stein, Tolman, Porche, and Spencer's concept of gender safety in schools (GSS) as a useful framework for providing a gendered analysis of safety and equality at the school level within the global context of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 goal of equitable, inclusive and quality education for all. This article…

After the implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2002, national educational standards reform has supported the idea that improvements in education can result from rigorous standards that uniformly evaluate learning. Educational assessment, however, is under increased scrutiny and teachers, students, as well as educational policy makers struggle…

This study considers how configurations of leadership practices impact perceptions of implementation during large-scale reform: implementation in the United States of Common Core State Standards. Comments of 951 respondents to a national teacher survey were examined. Analysis revealed the hybrid nature of leadership enactment with a range of…

Five-plus years into the experiment with new "college- and career-ready standards" (of which Common Core is the most notable and most controversial example), we know little about teachers' implementation and the ways policy can support that implementation. This paper uses new state-representative teacher survey data to characterize the…

Successful implementation of academic standards depends on teachers' understanding of the intended policy and their interpretation of what the policy means for their instruction (Spillane et al., 2002). This study examines the writing tasks fourth- and fifth- grade teachers understand as being aligned with the CCSS [Common Core State Standards],…

This article investigates the interaction between the Common Core State Standards and curricular tracking by examining instructional decision making across tracks in a large metropolitan district. This study draws on institutional logics as a framework to analyze 106 instructional decisions from 24 participants involved in middle school literacy…