After the Spring 2014 primaries, the Common Core State Standards were viewed as a political hot potato. As former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, "the Common Core has become toxic, I think it's radioactive…It has become an incredibly controversial topic on both the left and the right." Even so, the Common Core turned out to play a…

A critical issue in educator preparation is how to ascertain if program graduates are sufficiently prepared to be effective through the acquisition of meaningful evidence of graduates' impact on their students. Challenges to proving specific impact of educator-preparation programs on student learning include identifying and following program…

Evidence has been accumulating for some time about the impact of standards-based education reforms on schools and schooling, but there has been little research investigating the influence of these reforms on university-based initial teacher education (ITE). This article critically inquiries into the effects of these reforms on an ITE co-teaching…

The authors examine the development and implementation of measures for the 2013 Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) thematic dimensions of innovation, engagement, and impact (IEI) at two AACSB-accredited business schools. Agreement exists among faculty in Study 1 that IEI should be viewed as interrelated and overlapping…

It has long been argued that U.S. states' differential performance on nationwide assessments may reflect differences in students' opportunity to learn the tested content that is primarily due to variation in curricular content standards, rather than in instructional quality or educational investment. To quantify the effect of differences in…

In this essay, the authors describe the benefits and theoretical connections of the Junior Model United Nations (JMUN) program in middle school classrooms. The lens used to view the JMUN program is informed by literature on the needs of young adolescents, inquiry learning, and global citizenship. Findings based on this literature illuminate…

With the adoption of new content standards, teachers are often left without adequate curriculum resources. This study examined how educators used their curricular resources to teach new mathematics standards in the USA. Analyses of open-ended survey responses from 257 teachers and teacher-leaders in Grades 3 through Grade 5 indicated that every…

Legislation leading to the mandating of accountability testing in schools was chronicled between the publication of "A Nation at Risk" (1983) to the conclusion of No Child Left Behind (2016). Involvement in education by the federal government increased throughout the educational legislation during this time period. The Omnibus Trade and…

As schools around the country implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), teachers and school librarians are looking for ways to incorporate more engaging nonfiction reading. The quantity of informational texts students will be required to read will increase drastically, and students will be asked to apply higher-level thinking skills to…

Grading according to standards, competencies, or concepts is nothing new.With the current grading system gaining more scrutiny, parts of the basic framework of how we grade students are being questioned. Stephens (2010) and Marzano and Heflebower (2011) reinforced the notion that homework, behavior, attendance, notebooks, and group work should not…

The Common Core State Standards highlight the need to read--independently, closely, and proficiently--increasingly complex texts. However, they do not specify how such reading is to be done. This column provides a brief critique of text complexity and close reading and offers some concrete ideas for operationalizing these two concepts in secondary…

Supporters of the Common Core State Standards are moving to confront increasingly high-profile opposition to the standards at the state and national levels by rallying the private sector and initiating coordinated public relations and advertising campaigns as schools continue implementation. In states such as Michigan and Tennessee, where…

Should all students take Algebra 2? Florida seemed to say "no" this spring with the passage of a law striking it from graduation requirements. Texas said much the same in legislation Republican Gov. Rick Perry signed this week that also backs away from Algebra 2 for all. Those steps come as the Common Core State Standards for math set…

Why are there only crumbs left at the bottom of the cereal box? Many factors, such as package handling, have caused the cereal pieces to break down into crumbs. This explanation is also related to the process of creating sediment from rocks. Sediment is created by weathering over millions of years, and it is deposited all over the world by…

As top-down mandates multiply, close supervision from outside the education field increases, and the professionalism of educators shrinks, criticism of neoliberal effects on education in the United States and elsewhere has become more frequent in professional publications. Neoliberalism, put simply, is the political philosophy that privileges free…