Throughout history, a disproportionate number of learners have been tracked into terminal vocational programs based on their race, income, gender and disability, leading to jobs with uncertain promise of economic growth and prosperity. While the quality of Career Technical Education (CTE) programs has significantly improved since then, many…

Efficient and effective student-centered instructional elements could potentially streamline educational processes and still produce competent professionals. However, successful implementation of technology-enriched courses that exceed course design standards and meet learners' needs is limited by contextual interactions of the course designer's…

This paper examines and critiques the accountability movement, high-stakes testing, and their relationship to the achievement gap. Analyzing the issues in the context of Texas, the paper discusses dropout rates that were incorrectly identified and reported, the role of courts and specific court cases in high-stakes testing, ethical considerations,…

External accountability policies have spread fast across various educational systems over the past decades. This research examines the relations of internal and external accountability with students' math achievement drawing on PISA 2012. With a sample of 44 educational systems, of which external accountability policies were identified, the…

This study introduces the construct of teacher leadership in the Saudi EFL higher education context. The key aims of this study are to understand the notion of teacher leadership from the EFL teachers' perspective, to identify various leadership roles EFL teachers undertake in this context, and to explore challenges associated with teacher…

Historically, education research and practice has failed to accentuate the factors that promote Black student success and, instead, produced deficit-centered narratives that focused on Black students' academic underachievement and challenges. These dominant narratives have negatively influenced Black students' experiences and there is a need for…

The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 grants states and districts the flexibility to use multiple measures to assess school performance and strategically manage public schools for improvement in the United States. However, there is a lack of systematic, evidence-based guidance for practitioners on how to interpret the complex relationships…

Schools and education in general have made an implicit and, we would assert, explicit promise to society to educate all the children in their care. Unfortunately, there are achievement gaps that illustrate how schools have broken this promise. Teacher evaluation and other accountability measures have been heralded as the answer to this problem.…

The most highlighted provision and consequence of the reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, is obsessive practices of assessing students across the United States (U.S.). Despite newly named policies, including Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA) of 2015, which governs…

This slide deck is a toolkit to help districts adapt existing school performance frameworks to the current moment or create new ones. These slides identify and walk through the fundamental questions districts need to consider in designing school performance frameworks that acknowledge the challenges that schools and students are facing, as well as…

Although parent involvement is a cornerstone of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), few individual parents of children with disabilities participate in civic engagement to voice their suggestions for the next IDEA reauthorization. To address this gap, a civic engagement training was conducted with 95 parents of children with…

Nebraska's constitution and state statutes require Nebraska's Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education (the Commission) to review the budget requests of the University of Nebraska, the Nebraska State College System, and the community colleges in light of specific criteria set forth in the statutes. The Commission also makes…

Educators, researchers, and policy makers concerned about college under-enrollment among underserved groups of students have traditionally focused reform efforts at the high school level. Over the last several decades, however, there has been a growing interest in improving college readiness beginning at the elementary level. Recently, the…

In this concluding article for the special issue on COVID-19 and K-12 arts education, the authors look forward to some positive possible changes for the delivery of arts education as students return to school past COVID-19 and will address some of the barriers to these positive changes, including policy opportunities and implications. The barriers…

Using administrative data from D.C. Public Schools, I use exogenous variation in the presence and intensity of teacher monitoring to show it significantly improves student test scores and reduces suspensions. Uniquely, my setting allows me to separately identify the effect of pre-evaluation monitoring from post-evaluation feedback. Monitoring's…