by Alyssa Hadley Dunn - 2020
This research investigates the experiences of educators in one metropolitan high school over the course of one school year. In particular, the research questions include: (1) How is the morale of exceptional urban teachers affected by the contextual factors of a neoliberal school climate? (2) How does their morale relate to teachers’ reports of their pedagogy? Findings share how teachers were making sense of a climate that felt like a “sinking ship” over which they had no control and how a “vicious cycle of disempowerment” influenced the way they believed they were performing in the classroom.
by Todd Herrenkohl & Leslie Herrenkohl - 2019
In an attempt to explore innovative models to improve student achievement, close the opportunity gap, and deepen the knowledge and skills of current and future educators, the Washington State Legislature passed a bill in 2012 that created a pilot project called Collaborative Schools for Innovation and Success (CSIS). This introduction describes the processes followed by the site teams as they prepared and then implemented their school improvement goals. It also highlights several broad contributions of the CSIS effort and introduces the articles of the special issue.
by Joanne Carney, Marilyn Chu, Jennifer Green, William Nutting, Susan Donnelly, Andrea Clancy, Marsha Buly & David Carroll - 2019
Achieving educational social justice requires teachers, administrators, teacher education programs, and community organizations to work together to meet the needs of students and their families as teachers—both novice and experienced—develop the skills and dispositions to teach all children. This case study uses mixed-methods research to analyze how one school-university partnership navigated the challenges inherent in such collaborative work.
by John Traynor & Deborah Tully - 2019
Using a mixed-method research design, this case study explores the impact of a six-year partnership between a public K–6 school and two private institutions of higher education. In this article, the partners describe the activities and progress toward stated goals over the life span of the partnership (2012–2018).
by Kate Napolitan, John Traynor, Deborah Tully, Joanne Carney, Susan Donnelly & Leslie Herrenkohl - 2019
This article describes how four teacher education programs took up a legislative initiative to better partner with local schools, families, and communities. It illustrates the impacts that these collaborations had on preservice teachers.
by Jennifer Ng, Donald Stull & Rebecca Martinez - 2019
In recent decades, federal policymakers have pushed for education to be a more “scientific” endeavor. Through an ethnographic study of one school district’s implementation of multi-tier system of supports, the authors examine the applied logic of this comprehensive reform initiative and its impact in practice.
by Toby Park, Chenoa Woods, Shouping Hu, Tamara Bertrand Jones, Oguzcan Cig & David Tandberg - 2018
In this article, the authors investigate whether recent developmental education reform in Florida has had any impact on the existing racial/ethnic achievement gap in successfully accessing and passing gateway (introductory college-level) courses.
by Ethan Ris - 2018
Between 1895 and 1920, a cohort of business, philanthropic, and academic leaders wielding tremendous wealth and power sought to reshape the form and function of American higher education. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful, but studying them helps us understand the recurrent impulse to reform America’s colleges and universities.
by Jane McCamant - 2018
This article uses a historical case study to consider the susceptibility to “scale-up” of education reforms that seek primarily to teach character or disposition.
by Celia Anderson, Erika Bullock, Beverly Cross & Angiline Powell - 2017
In this analytic essay, the authors consider the challenges to implementing culturally relevant pedagogy in a hyper-reform urban setting. The authors use Memphis as a particular context to outline these challenges and offer a framework describing the conceptual shifts that would support culturally relevant pedagogy in this context and others like it.
by Thomas Smith, Marisa Cannata, Lora Cohen-Vogel & Stacey Rutledge - 2016
This introduction frames this yearbook on high school reform, implementation, and scale, and outlines why it is important to understand these perspectives. The four main sections of the issue are introduced and situated within the existing research literature.
by Leslie Siskin - 2016
This paper explores a distinctive aspect of International Baccalaureate’s effort to scale up in Title I schools. The effort reflects what we call mutual adaptation in action.
by Sam Stringfield, David Reynolds & Eugene Schaffer - 2016
Data from a 15-year, mixed-methods study of all 11 secondary schools in one British local authority demonstrate the value of adopting High Reliability Organization principles.
by Donald Peurach, Sarah Lenhoff & Joshua Glazer - 2016
This analysis examines developmental evaluation as an approach to analyzing school improvement networks as “learning systems” able to produce, use, and refine practical knowledge in large numbers of schools.
by David Meens & Kenneth Howe - 2015
This article examines the NCLB Act and its underlying reform agenda of increased “accountability” and “choice” in light of its consequences for education policymaking and democratic education.
by Tina Trujillo & Michelle Renée - 2015
This article evaluates the tensions with democratic education inherent in the federal School Improvement Grant program’s market-based school reforms. The paper culminates in a set of recommendations that are intended to re-center the purposes of public education for low-income students, students of color, and local communities in developing more equitable, democratic school turnarounds.
by Harvey Kantor - 2015
by Kathleen Nolan - 2015
This article develops the concept and provides an illustrative portrait of teachers’ care-based resistance practices in the context of neoliberal school reform. Data presented come from a critical ethnographic study of policy enactment in an urban high school experiencing high levels of school reform.
by Gretchen Brion-Meisels - 2015
Drawing on data from two qualitative studies, this chapter argues that both school organizations and individual students will benefit from centering youth voices in student support systems. To do this, the author shares data from adolescents’ narratives that demonstrate how young people’s voices might (re)shape the central practices of school-based support processes.
by Tom Dolan, Brian Christens & Cynthia Lin - 2015
Community organizing efforts employ different types of research as they seek to address community issues. This chapter details the evolving use of research in a youth organizing effort in San Bernardino, CA that has addressed issues in schools, the educational system, and the broader community. We examine the youth organizers’ use of organizing research and youth participatory action research (YPAR) and the contributions of each form of research to the organizing effort.
by Jerusha Conner & Sonia Rosen - 2015
This chapter explores how youth organizers have injected themselves into education policy conversations in Philadelphia, asserting their agency and using their voices to shape how policymakers view them as well as the problems that confront them.
by David Tandberg, Nicholas Hillman & Mohamed Barakat - 2014
Performance-based funding programs have become a popular state policy strategy for increasing college completions, among other things. This study asks, To what extent does the introduction of performance funding programs impact two-year degree completion among participating states? Using a difference-in-differences technique, we find that the program had no effect on average and mixed results for the individual states. We conclude that the policy is not a “silver bullet” for improving community college completions.
by Wayne Au & Joseph Ferrare - 2014
Using social network analysis, critical policy studies, and literacy theory, this study analyzes the network of policy actors involved in the campaign to pass a charter school initiative in the state of Washington. This study finds that through a combination individual donations and the support to key local organizations provided by their affiliated philanthropic organizations, a small group of wealthy individuals leveraged a disproportionate amount of influence over the direction and outcome of the charter school initiative in the state of Washington, particularly relative to the average Washington voter.
by David Berliner - 2013
This paper points out that the most popular current school reforms offered have failed to accomplish their goal because they fail to understand the fundamental problem of American schools, namely, income inequality and the poverty that accompanies such inequality. Prescriptions to fix our schools cannot work if the diagnosis about what is wrong with them is in error.
by Jeffrey Henig - 2013
This article, part of a special issue of TCR, considers the political dimensions of validity questions as raised by a keynote address and panel discussion originally held at Teachers College in March 2012.
by Laura Desimone - 2013
This study addresses the question: How do educators describe their responses to standards-based reform? We draw on interview data from 60 teachers in 32 schools, in 10 districts in 5 states. Our analysis addresses the following key debates that surround standards and accountability policy: 1) the extent to which previously “left behind” students are receiving better instruction, 2) whether teachers and principals feel accountable to student achievement in a way that fosters positive behavior change, 3) how teachers describe “teaching to the test,” and when and if this is good or bad for teachers and students, and 4) the extent to which educators describe standards-based reforms as fostering desirable changes in pedagogy and/or the content of instruction.
by Fred Janssen, Hanna Westbroek, Walter Doyle & Jan van Driel - 2013
Many attempts to reform teaching fail to be enacted in most classrooms. The purpose of this paper is to present a bridging methodology for connecting pedagogical innovations to the practical demands of teaching.
by Jal Mehta - 2013
This article considers three movements across the 20th century that sought to reform schools through standards, tests, and accountability, identifies similarities in the ways in which higher status epistemic communities have been repeatedly able to purvey technocratic logics that overwhelm a weakly professionalized educational field, and suggests that educators need to organize themselves into a stronger profession if they want to improve outcomes and free themselves from the whims of external actors.
by Martin Scanlan & Peter Miller - 2013
This study examines the genesis of a neighborhood educational opportunity zone: a geographically defined area where a disproportionately large population of traditionally marginalized children and families are clustered and resources are intensely focused to respond to the concomitant needs. Guided by sociocultural learning theory, we examine how communities of practice influence the learning among the adults in a neighborhood educational opportunity zone.
by Joshua Cowen & Jacob Fowles - 2013
This article presents a case study of teacher bargaining contracts over a 30-year historical period. Examining several areas of current interest, including salary schedules, transfer and assignment policies, teacher evaluation, dismissal, and working conditions, the analysis reveals very little change in more than three decades.
