This article provides a conceptual analysis of empirical research that examines the connection between teachers’ education and its outcomes, consequences, or results, and then links this research to the political controversies and the local and larger policy debates that have shaped it. The article identifies six genres that capture the multiple ways researchers from different disciplines and with different intentions have conceptualized and studied these connections.

In view of the widespread attention given to endowments of colleges and universities in recent decades, this historical essay explains how the importance of endowment, the emphasis upon increasing it, the competition for it, and even its current meaning originated between 1890 and 1930. This development established an upper tier of wealthy universities that maintained their elite status through the ensuing century, thereby contributing to the stratification of higher education in the United States over the long term.

This self-study of practice explores how three mothers who are also educators negotiate their cross-class identities while living a curriculum of moral education with their children who are growing up upper middle class. The approaches and strategies of living a moral education curriculum chronicled in their stories offer a developmentally sensitive model of moral education that could, with modification, inform approaches to educating critical class conscious educators.

This article examines a reform effort initiated by a coalition of educational leaders and community-based organizations in Los Angeles as a means of providing high-quality public school options for students in an underserved community. Based on interviews with school district, community, union, and other educational leaders, this study explores how various political actors collaborated to bring about unprecedented education reform in the nation’s second largest school district, highlighting both the promise and challenge of community organizing for school reform.

Entrants to teaching from other careers potentially provide a source of teachers for hard-to-staff rural and urban schools. Based on retrospective, longitudinal data collected through a survey of over 2,000 Teach For America (TFA) teachers who began their careers in schools serving high proportions of low-income and minority children, I found that older TFA entrants to teaching had a lower risk than did younger entrants of leaving low-income schools, the teaching profession, and broader school-based roles. I further found that, among those who left teaching, older entrants’ reasons for doing so differed from those of their younger counterparts.

This article outlines a new conceptual framework for promoting postsecondary educational achievement and workforce development among low-income parents while simultaneously advancing the learning and healthy development of their young children. It proposes a dual-generational intervention—an approach that addresses the educational needs of both children and their parents—whereby early childhood education programs may serve as the access point for promoting low-income parents’ postsecondary education and career training.

This article examines how the context of work affects teachers’ job satisfaction, their decisions to remain in their school, and student achievement. The authors found that teachers are more satisfied and plan to stay longer in schools that have a positive work environment, and that students in these schools achieve greater academic growth. Although a wide range of working conditions matter to teachers, social conditions including the school culture, the principal’s leadership, and relationships among colleagues are most important.

This paper introduces the special issue, Horne v. Flores and the Future of Language Policy.

In this study a representative sample of 880 elementary and secondary teachers currently teaching in 33 schools across the state of Arizona were asked about their perceptions of how their ELL students were faring under current instructional policies for ELL students. Teachers were surveyed during the Spring of 2010. Overall findings show that most of these Arizona teachers have a great deal of faith in their ELL students' ability to achieve at grade level, but that the 4-hour ELD block to which they are assigned is not helping them to catch up with their English speaking peers academically. Furthermore, findings reveal that there is deep and overwhelming concern about the segregation they are experiencing as a result of this instructional model; 85% believe this separation from English speaking peers is harmful to their learning. Most also believe that the majority of their ELL students are not meeting grade level standards and more than half of teachers also note that their ELL students are stereotyped as slow learners by other students and that the 4 hour block program is harmful to their self-esteem. The study ends with a series of recommendations including that alternative modes of instruction need to be implemented to help ELL students to succeed academically.

This study is the first attempt to look at a statewide representative random sample of 65 school districts across the state of Arizona under the 4-hour English Language Development (ELD) block policy. The goal of the study is to better understand what are the positive aspects, and the major challenges of implementing the 4-hour ELD block in Arizona. Survey data were collected from school district’s leaders—English Language Coordinators (ELC)—. Analyses reveal that the vast majority of ELCs think that, as a result of the program, there is an increased focus on English Language Learner (ELL) students' English language development. Regarding the challenges of the program, ELCs think that the implementation of the 4-hour ELD block has: a) neglected core areas of academic content that are critical for ELL students' academic success, b) contributed to ELL students' isolation, c) limited ELL students opportunities for on-time high school graduation, and d) assumed that English language learning can be accomplished within an unrealistic timeframe and under a set of unrealistic conditions. The study ends with a series of recommendations including more effective monitoring of reclassification, re-entry, and opting-out rates of ELLs.

Arizona’s Structured English Immersion (SEI) four-hour model has negative implications for English language learners (ELLs). Students, who are subjected to a prescriptive model which has resulted from a convergence of major laws, mandates, and policy decisions of the past decade, are faced with receiving an education which is unequal to that of their mainstream peers. An entire generation of students has been left underserved.

In the Horne v Flores Supreme Court decision of June 25, 2009, the Court wrote that one basis for finding Arizona in compliance with federal law regarding the education of its English learners was that the state had adopted a “significantly more effective” than bilingual education instructional model for EL students ‐‐Structured English Immersion (SEI). This paper reviews the extant research on SEI, its definitions, origins, and its effectiveness, particularly in contrast to other instructional strategies. The paper concludes that there is no research basis for the Court’s statement, that at best SEI is no better or no worse than other instructional strategies, particularly bilingual instruction, when they are both well implemented. However, SEI as implemented in Arizona carries serious negative consequences for EL students stemming from the excessive amount of time dedicated to a sole focus on English instruction, the de‐emphasis on grade level academic curriculum, the discrete skills approach it employs, and the segregation of EL students from mainstream peers. Moreover, the paper argues that there are, in fact, strategies that can ameliorate these problems as well as provide an additive, rather than a subtractive, educational experience for English learner and mainstream students alike.

This is a study of the segregation and isolation of English learners in Arizona schools, which is exacerbated by the mandated four-hour English Language Development program required by the state. The study finds this program harmful to EL students and suggests research-based alternatives.

The present report reviews achievement gaps in both reading and math between ELL and non-ELL students in Arizona, a state with restrictive language policies, over the period 2005-2009 and during the first year of implementation of the 4 hour ELD block, 2008-09. It also compares the progress of Arizona’s ELL population towards academic proficiency relative to ELL students in two cities and states that do not place as restrictive legislation on ELL instruction: Utah and Washington, DC, two educational entities with vastly different spending policies. The results show that restrictive policies in Arizona have generated no substantive decrease in achievement gaps, particularly at secondary levels, and, in comparison to other states without such restrictive measures, Arizona’s achievement gaps are clearly high.

This article presents an investigation of the degree to which teachers’ instructional support and emotional warmth contributed to reading achievement for a sample of predominantly at-risk students in upper elementary grades. Cross-level interactions indicate that emotional warmth was particularly salient for English language learners in dual language immersion, whereas instructional support moderated the relationship between developmental bilingual education and reading achievement.

This article demonstrates how the use of conceptual change theory as commonly applied to learning in science classrooms is an appropriate and valuable framework for understanding how teachers change their ideas about the pedagogical implications of student diversity.

This article explores the teaching challenges articulated by beginning mathematics teachers and argues that induction programs need to move from a focus on supporting new teachers who are flailing to a focus on supporting new teachers in addressing the subject-specific challenges of learning to teach.

This article examines the relation between school-level academic performance and dropout rates under North Carolina’s accountability system. Using data on every public school student in the state over an 8-year period, we examine (1) the relation between changes in academic performance and the subsequent dropout rate, and (2) the relation between changes in the dropout rate and subsequent performance.

In this article, we examine how international field experiences promote cross-cultural awareness in U.S. American preservice teachers through experiential learning. The findings we present are based on a 6-year study of a short-term study abroad program in Honduras and contribute to the effort to prepare future teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms beginning at the preservice level.

This article draws on philosophical and empirical inquiries into the nature of practice, practical reasoning, and scholarship to argue that, given the goal of improving teacher education practice, scholarship about the work is not sufficient. Rather, we also must cultivate a form of scholarship that models and makes visible the interplay of reasoning and action that underlies skilled practice—what the author calls “scholarship in practice.”

A conceptual framework for understanding and supporting the development of an inquiry stance in collaborative teacher inquiry groups is presented.

The study examined change in teachers’ knowledge and practices while participating in a 5-year teacher professional development intervention that was designed to improve science instruction while supporting literacy development of English language learning students from Grades 3–5 in the context of accountability policy in science. The results from the questionnaire (what teachers reported) and classroom observations (what teachers were observed doing) indicated some improvements in teachers’ knowledge and practices in teaching science to ELL students over the intervention.

This article begins with one student teacher’s recounted example of classroom practice and then draws on cultural historical activity theory to consider how teacher educators might have better supported this student teacher, thereby enhancing her own and her students’ learning.

This article examines students’ sense of belonging in secondary schools offering different tracks and the role played by the faculty’s trust in the students.

This study examines the perspectives of 8 exemplary African American elementary teachers toward science homework.