The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children in Texas and across the United States. The theme of this issue is English Learner Literacy. Articles include: (1) School Leaders Improve…

In 2010, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for K-12 English language arts/literacy and mathematics. CCSS are a state-led effort to define the knowledge and skills students need to graduate from high school…

This dissertation charts that growth of the profession of fundraising at American colleges and universities. Fundraising has been central to college and university operations from the beginning of American higher education; the fundraising professional, however, is a 20th century phenomenon. From their first campaigns to erect a building or…

This Governing Board Monitoring Report utilizes the Board outcome metrics to gauge institutional effectiveness in the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD). Outcomes for University Transfer Education and General Education, Workforce and Economic Development, Developmental Education, and Community Development and Global and Civic…

Intercultural understanding is increasingly prioritized in the teaching and learning of world languages. Empirical evidence reveals the ways in which an intercultural communicative approach to foreign language instruction can foster learners' intercultural competence (Garrett-Rucks, 2016). Yet, in the U.S., there remains a disconnect in the…

In this age of teacher accountability, school districts are increasingly interested in using the best possible methods in evaluating their teachers. This interest impacts new alternative certification teachers, as well as traditional teachers. An increasingly popular assessment is the Danielson Framework, which is a set of 22 components of…

Competence as a measure of "fitness to practice" and its evaluation through mechanisms of personal performance review, has led to the introduction of systems in a number of professions which link appraisal to the maintenance of professional registration (variously referred to as re-validation, re-certification, re-accreditation, etc.).…

This study was designed to determine (a) the extent to which Alabama Secondary Cooperative Education Teacher-Coordinators perceive specific workplace-readiness skills are important for student success in the workplace; (b) whether or not statistical significance is found between / among the following four variables in the Cooperative Education…

Throughout this article, we discuss the neoliberal assault on public education, specifically in the United States, which, through coercive means, is anti-feminist, racist, and classist and demonstrates a deliberate attack on the female-dominated teaching profession. By contextualizing and analyzing education policies through a framework of…

Online counselor education has been studied extensively since its inception, but the experiences of students within these programs have received limited attention. This collaborative view from faculty and students of online counselor education was developed to share the stories of students who have engaged in both synchronous and asynchronous…

The purpose of this project was to examine the results of 8 key assessments that elementary and secondary teacher education candidates completed during their teacher education program. The participants for this project were 72 elementary and 49 secondary pre-service teaching candidates at a mid-sized urban university in the Midwest who were in the…

Music educator preparation curricula have been studied by several researchers (Killian, Dye & Wayman, 2013; Raiber & Teachout, 2014; Thornton, Murphy & Hamilton, 2004). Preservice educators complete a unique curriculum to meet the requirements of their institution based on the guidelines for teacher certification set by the state…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis will undoubtedly have dire consequences for all sectors of public education. The rapid transition to remote modes of instruction in the spring of 2020 and the subsequent anxiety about the start of the 2020-21 academic year have highlighted the critical need for well-prepared educators. Although calls…

Despite the importance of teachers, the preparation programs intended to train them and provide them with the foundational skills they need to grow into high-quality educators vary in format, curriculum offered, quality, and more. Alternative teacher certification programs that are run outside of institutions of higher education (IHE) are an…

Teach For America (TFA), founded in 1989, has grown to become one of the largest providers of educators in the country for high-needs, under-resourced schools. TFA recruits high-performing college graduates and professionals and prepares them for teaching during five to seven weeks of intensive pre-service training at one of its regional or…