bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The GED and the Rise of Contextless Accountability
Authors: Hutt Ethan L.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Policy discussions in the U.S. and abroad have become increasingly studded with reference to the results of international tests like PISA. Unlike most assessments, PISA is not designed to measure whether students have mastered a particular school curriculum but rather provide a measure of students’ ability to meet future challenges irrespective of where in the world they live. Though growing in influence, the concept of a “contextless” form of accountability has an important antecedent in the history of American education: the Tests of General Educational Development (GED), which were developed in the 1940s to assist the transition of American World War II servicemen and women.

Purpose

The purpose of the study is to use the history of the development and subsequent spread of the GED examine the general challenge posed by contextless accountability measures.

Research Design

This study draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources to present a historical analysis of the development and diffusion of the Tests of General Educational Development.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Noting the strong parallels between the history of the GED and the current popularity of international measures like PISA, this paper examines the history and development of the GED in order investigate the allure, promise, and pitfalls of contextless assessment and accountability. In so doing, this paper illustrates the importance of quantification as a means of creating useful abstractions but also the inherent danger of the perceived certainty of these kinds of metrics. In the decades following the 1940s, the GED retained its reputation as an objective, readily available, measure of high school achievement that could be used in any context and with any population—a task it was never intended or designed to fulfill. Thus, this paper argues, the American experience with the GED offers important lessons and insights in a world where PISA continues the reign of contextless, test-based accountability systems. Namely, that the level of abstraction required to develop these measures makes them ill-suited to inform the kind of specific policy discussion in which they are frequently invoked.
The Influence of Teacher and Peer Relationships on Students’ Classroom Engagement and Everyday Motivational Resilience
Authors: Furrer Carrie J. , Skinner Ellen A. , Pitzer Jennifer R.
Published: November 2021

The quality of students’ relationships with teachers and peers is a fundamental substrate for the development of academic engagement and achievement. This chapter offers teachers and researchers a motivational framework that explains how positive and negative student–teacher and student–peer relationships are sustained in the classroom, and strategies for creating solutions to improve relationships.
Alternative Learning Contexts and the Goals of Democracy in Education
Authors: Kelly Deirdre M.
Published: November 2021

This chapter delineates three models of democracy, noting the role that alternative education plays within each model. Then, from the perspective of the participatory democracy model, I examine various initiatives to foster democracy in alternative learning contexts, drawing relevant examples from the literature to highlight critical issues, tensions, and dilemmas, and lessons learned.

… the history of the public alternative schools movement is more than an account of the development of preference in public education, it is a story about competing ideas on purposes and goals of schooling; it is a story about democratizing public education. (Neumann, 2003, p. 2)
A Dialogical Inquiry into Practice Frameworks within Jabiru Community College: Re-centering Young People and Community within a Social Constructionist Frame
Authors: Westoby Peter , Toon M. F. Paul , Morris Ken
Published: November 2021

This chapter explores the practice framework guiding the practice of workers at Jabiru Community College, a community-based school in Brisbane, Australia. The chapter articulates the findings from a dialogical inquiry begun by the three authors with input from workers and youth. Seven dimensions of the framework being used by workers are described.

Australian scholar Raewyn Connell stated in a recently published edited collection, Schools, communities and social inclusion, We rely on schools for social progress and mobility, and of course influential people usually have done well at school. But school systems that rely on competitive tests, examinations, selective provision and rationing of advanced education also sort children ruthlessly, steering some towards privilege and some towards exploitation. Schools lift some out of poverty but destroy others’ hopes and without conscious intention, lock out many of the rising generation from advanced education, professions and many riches of our culture. (2011, p. xi)
Cross-Country Generalizability of the Role of Metacognitive Knowledge in Students’ Strategy Use and Reading Competence
Authors: Artelt Cordula , Schneider Wolfgang
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Because metacognitive knowledge includes knowledge about adequate learning strategies, and because an effective use of learning strategies is associated with higher levels of performance, substantial relationships can be assumed between metacognitive knowledge, strategic behavior, and performance. However, such a pattern of results is rarely found in the research literature. In part, this may be due to inadequate indicators of strategy use.

Purpose of study

Prior research showed that high scores on self-reported strategy use were only mirrored in high levels of performance when students had sufficient metacognitive knowledge. To test the cross-country generalizability of the relationship between metacognitive knowledge, strategy use, and reading competence, we analyzed data from the PISA 2009-study, in which similar measures of metacognitive knowledge as well as of students’ strategy use were used.

Research Design

The study uses a cross-sectional correlational design. It draws on representative samples of fifteen-year-old students from 34 OECD countries taking part in the PISA 2009 study. The relations between students’ reading competence scores, their metacognitive knowledge as well as their self-reported use of learning strategies were analyzed. We used correlations, mediation, as well as moderator regression analyses to predict students’ reading competence.

Findings/Results

Results showed consistently moderate to high correlations between meta-cognitive knowledge and reading competence. There were also lower, but still significant, relationships between strategy use and both reading competence and metacognitive knowledge. Testing a “mediator model” with strategy use as a mediator resulted in small but significant effects of strategy use as mediator. Assuming that metacognitive knowledge might be a necessary precondition for effective strategy use, the study tested whether it served as a moderator. Results confirmed this moderator effect for many but not all countries. However, across all countries, there was a consistently high effect of metacognitive knowledge on reading competence, independent of the level of self-reported use of strategies.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The results are very similar across countries. Taken together, the findings suggest that metacognitive knowledge as measured by a test tapping declarative, conditional and relational strategy knowledge is an important predictor of students’ reading competence, and contributes significantly to our understanding of what helps students to become better readers. Metacognitive knowledge captures the prerequisite of adaptive strategic processing of texts. Increasing students’ knowledge in this domain is a promising approach when it comes to fostering self-regulated reading.
Moving beyond Country Rankings in International Assessments: The Case of PISA
Authors: Perry Nancy , Ercikan Kadriye
Published: November 2021

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students’ reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since 2000. Also, the PISA collects information about how those outcomes are related to key demographic, social, economic, and educational variables. However, the preponderance of reports involving PISA data focus on achievement variables and cross-national comparisons of achievement variables. Challenges in evaluating achievement of students from different cultural and educational settings and data concerning students’ approaches to learning, motivation for learning, and opportunities for learning are rarely reported. A main goal of this themed issue of Teachers College Record (TCR) is to move the conversation about PISA data beyond achievement to also include factors that affect achievement (e.g., SES, home environment, strategy use). Also we asked authors to consider how international assessment data can be used for improving learning and education and what appropriate versus inappropriate inferences can be made from the data. In this introduction, we synthesize the six articles in this issue and themes that cut across them. Also we examine challenges associated with using data from international assessments, like the PISA, to inform education policy and practice within and across countries. We conclude with recommendations for collecting and using data from international assessments to inform research, policy, and teaching and learning.
Beyond Ranking of Nations: Innovative Research on PISA
Authors: Sireci Stephen
Published: November 2021

In this article, I review and provide comments on the articles that comprise this special issue on research conducted using PISA data. The articles represent a variety of issues and methods related to contemporary educational assessments and education policies. They feature state-of-the-art statistical analyses and instructive exploration of complex issues related to international assessment of students’ math, reading, and science achievement. A common theme underlying the articles is improving the interpretations of the results of educational assessments. Some articles address this theme via post hoc analysis or discussion of results, while others conduct research that informs future test development efforts.
Classroom-based Inequalities and Achievement Gaps in First Grade: The Role of Classroom Context and Access to Qualified and Effective Teachers
Authors: Palardy Gregory
Published: November 2021

Background

An enduring question about achievement gaps is, which aspects of schools contribute most? At the early grade levels, when children spend the vast majority of their school day in a single classroom with a single teacher, school inequities that correlate with achievement gaps likely originate within the classroom. This study examined the degree to which three potential sources of classroom-based inequality contribute to reading and math achievement gaps that develop during first grade, including classroom context, access to a qualified teachers, and access to an effective teacher. The study also estimated the degree to which these effects are manifested among classrooms within the same school and between classrooms at different schools, which has implications for policy and practice.

Population

A nationally representative sample of first graders from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study was used. An important feature of ECLS data is that students were administered reading and math achievement tests near the beginning and near the end of first grade. This sampling design allows for the estimation of student achievement gains during first grade that does not include the summer period, which has confounded past efforts to study achievement gaps.

Research Design

Multilevel models were used to estimate classroom-specific and school-specific random effects (i.e., residuals), which are conceptualized as within- and between-school classroom effects. These random effects were then used as outcomes to estimate the degree to which within- and between-school classroom effects contribute to Black–White and Hispanic– White achievement gaps that develop during first grade. Covariates for classroom context, access to a qualified teacher, and access to an effective teacher were entered into the model hierarchically to isolate their effects on the gaps.

Conclusions

Classroom inequality within and between schools contributed substantially to achievement gaps that developed during first grade. Inequality in contextual aspects of classrooms was the most prominent school-based factor, the majority of which originated from classrooms in different schools rather than classrooms in the same school. However, compared to White children attending the same school, Black children tended to be members of a classroom with more negative contextual characteristics and a less effective teacher. This within-school inequity likely stems from non-random assignment of students to teachers. Finally, Black and Hispanic children were slightly less likely to be taught by a highly qualified teacher. However, that inequity did not significantly contribute to achievement gaps.
Research and Policy Perspectives on Data-Based Decision Making in Education
Authors: Orland Martin
Published: November 2021

The suite of papers in this special Teachers College Recordissue on data-driven decision making in education reflects a burgeoning subdiscipline of scholarship on the topic that has been stimulated by the constantly evolving educational policy landscape. For at least two decades, policy makers have resonated to the importance of data in education as an accountability tool and have advocated policies for the collection and reporting of such data to fulfill accountability objectives. Early examples of this at the federal level include the creation of the National Education Goals Panel in 1990 (National Education Goals Panel, 1999) to annually report on national and state educational progress toward the National Education Goals adopted by president and the nation's governors, as well as requirements by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for data documenting the effectiveness of federal programs both in and outside of education under the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1994.

The argument or implicit logic model among policy makers for the role and importance of data for accountability has taken two principal forms that we can label “soft” and “hard” accountability. Under soft accountability, the revelation of comparable public data about the performance of various levels of the system (e.g., states, districts, schools) is assumed to create public pressure on these entities’ future performance (National Research Council, 2011). That is, “naming and shaming” jurisdictions through publishing data about student achievement, dropout rates, qualifications of teachers, spending levels, and so on are assumed to create needed incentives for these entities to maintain their relative standing on these indicators if they are high or to improve them if they're low. One prominent example of soft accountability through data is the increasing promulgation of state reports during the 1990s and 2000s providing public metrics on critical indicators for all schools in a state.1 Currently, all 50 states and the District of Columbia now publish such report cards annually as a requirement for receiving federal Title 1 funds.2
Cultural Identity and Allegiance among Vietnamese Students and Their Organizations at the University of California, Irvine: 1980–1990
Authors: Nguyen Thai-Huy , Gasman Marybeth
Published: November 2021

Background

Within the canon of Asian American histories and histories of student activism, little attention is given to the Vietnamese students at the University of California at Irvine, who came together to advocate for the well-being of Vietnamese refugees after the end of the Vietnam War. This study examines this history and discusses the implications for understanding the unique histories that shape the lives of our increasingly diverse student populations.

Purpose

The objective of this study is to unearth and examine the experiences of Vietnamese students at the University of California at Irvine after the Vietnam War, between 1980 and 1990, and how their student organizations functioned to help them make sense of their personal losses as well as mobilize their efforts to highlight the plight of Vietnamese refugees.

Research Design

Primary and secondary sources were used to support this historical analysis.

Data Collection

Archival material came from the University of California at Irvine's Southeast Asian Archive.

Conclusions

This study pushes back against popular historical narratives that either ignore or blur the distinct experiences, traditions, and political and economic statuses among the U.S. Asian population. We demonstrate how Vietnamese students were active in their pursuit to improve the social and political conditions for their community. Moreover, this history brings forward very critical issues of student organizing and civic engagement and immigration.
Participatory Democracy and Struggling Schools: Making Space for Youth in School Turnarounds
Authors: Kirshner Ben , Jefferson Antwan
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Federal policy, as codified in Race to the Top (RTT) funding guidelines, outlines four types of intervention: turnaround, restart, closure, and transformation. RTT has embraced a technocratic paradigm for school reform that frames choice less as the opportunity for the public to deliberate about what it wants from its schools and more in terms of the freedom of individual families to choose, as customers, from a diverse array of school options. This market-based system has eroded substantive opportunities for parents and students to participate in decisions about their schools. Although scholars have developed compelling arguments about the need to involve parents and teachers in a more deliberative and democratic approach to intervening in low-performing schools, there is little scholarship focused on the role of young people in school intervention processes.

Purpose

There is widespread agreement among progressive critics that RTT interventions are not sufficiently democratic. More work is needed to develop participatory approaches. In some cases this may require departing from a strict “evidence-based” framework and imagining new alternatives consistent with values of social justice and educational equity. It also requires expanding existing treatments of deliberative democracy theory to include young people. Research Design & Findings: This article makes a conceptual argument rooted in theory, empirical literature, and practical experience in schools. After explaining theories of participatory democracy, youth–adult partnerships, and thirdspace, we propose five practices that should guide a deliberative, participatory approach to public decision-making about schools. These are: border-crossing facilitation, participatory research, multilingual and multicultural discourse practices, authentic decision-making, and joint work and distributed expertise.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The current school turnaround paradigm, embodied by closures, conversion to charters, and teacher reassignments, has left a great deal of collateral damage in its wake. Teachers work under threat of firing. We propose an alternative approach to improve struggling public neighborhood schools—not just another option in a menu of turnaround strategies, but an alternative frame and set of practices that expands the conversation about intervention. This approach encourages deliberation and communication among diverse networks of students, teachers, and families.
Impeded Attainment? The Role of State Exit Examination-Alternative Route Policy Combinations
Authors: Traynor Anne , Chapman Allison E. A.
Published: November 2021

Background

To allay public concerns that state graduation examination mandates might unfairly hinder some students’ educational attainment prospects, most states with exit exam requirements offer alternative routes to earning a regular high school diploma. In spite of poor public documentation of alternative route usage rates, some exit exam states’ alternative credentialing policies have been linked to their relatively high reported graduation rates. However, there is little empirical evidence that these alternative route policies blunt the reported negative effects of exit exam requirements on diploma attainment in the general student population.

Purpose

We investigate the consequences of several distinct state exit exam-alternative route graduation policy combinations on the subsequent educational attainment of tenth graders in the graduating class of 2004.

Research Design

Data for our study are drawn from the cohort of U.S. tenth graders (N = 13,636) sampled by the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002–2006. We use logistic regression models to estimate the relationships between state exam difficulty-alternative route policy combinations and two educational attainment outcomes: high school diploma acquisition and postsecondary school enrollment.

Conclusions

While we find no relationship between exit exam policies and students’ subsequent postsecondary school enrollment, we conclude that students subject to relatively difficult state exit exams are less likely to earn a regular high school diploma than those not subject to an exam requirement. Estimating our models in the subsample of English language learner students as a model plausibility check, we observe marginally significant, but sizable, negative effects of both minimum-competency and more-difficult exit exams on diploma attainment. Our results suggest that alternative route options neither eliminate, nor appreciably attenuate, more-difficult exit exams’ negative impact on diploma attainment in the general student population or among English language learners.
A Call to Action: The Challenges of Creative Teaching and Learning
Authors: Sawyer Keith
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

In spite of the widely acknowledged importance of creativity to society and the economy, scholars have had difficulty providing research-based recommendations for how to foster creativity in schools. The article extends three strands of research that have attempted to provide such recommendations: studies of whether creativity training enhances domain-general creativity; studies of whether arts education and arts integration enhance cognitive skills that transfer to other content areas; and studies of collaborative learning environments, designed to foster deeper conceptual understanding in the content areas.

Purpose/Objective

The focus of the article is to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster greater creativity. I bring together arts education research, creativity research, and learning sciences research to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster creative learning outcomes.

Research Design

This is primarily a review article. It provides meta-analyses of three strands of research—creativity training, arts education, and learning sciences. The conclusion of this review is that domain-general creativity training is less effective than domain-specific changes in how each subject is taught.

Conclusions

We are not likely to enhance student creativity by teaching for creativity in a distinct, domain general way. Instead, educating for creativity is most effective when schools change the way each subject is taught. Learning sciences research has provided strong evidence that the most creative learning, in all subjects, results from pedagogical strategies that are active, constructivist, collaborative, and improvisational. I provide research-based recommendations for how to design learning environments that result in creative learning outcomes.
The Impact of Full-Time Enrollment in the First Semester on Community College Transfer Rates: New Evidence from Texas with Pre-College Determinants
Authors: Park Toby J.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Recent developments in state-level policy have begun to require, incentivize, and/or encourage students at community colleges to enroll full time in an effort to increase the likelihood that students will persist and transfer to four-year institution where they will be able to complete their bachelor's degree. Often, these policies are predicated on the idea that full-time status is associated with greater engagement on behalf of the student, a concept that has been widely studied in higher education as it relates to student persistence and degree attainment.

Purpose

Building upon theory and observational studies, I seek to empirically test whether enrolling full time at a community college has a discernible effect on transferring to a four-year university.

Research Design

I follow four cohorts of first-time traditionally aged college students who graduated from a public high school in Texas in the years 2000–2003 and employ a propensity score matching procedure designed to reduce sample selection bias.

Findings

I find that enrolling full time increases overall transfer rates by at least 12%. These results are robust to the inclusion of many pre-college factors as well as to a sensitivity analysis, across four separate cohorts.

Conclusions/Recommendations

This study provides evidence in support of a key policy lever for increase transfer rates already in place in a handful of states: encouraging incentivizing, or requiring full-time enrollment. The key, however, will be to develop policy that results in more students enrolling full time while also maintaining the open access mission of community colleges. While requiring students to enroll full time may not be appropriate in all contexts, states should seriously consider other ways to incentivize or, at a minimum, support and encourage full-time enrollment, particularly for first-time traditionally aged students.
Centering Students in School-Based Support Processes: Critical Inquiries and Shifting Perspectives
Authors: Brion-Meisels Gretchen
Published: November 2021

Although student support systems exist in most U.S. schools today, these systems frequently operate without input from young people. Here, I draw on data from two studies that explore youth perspectives of support processes, arguing that both school organizations and individual students will benefit from centering youth voices in student support systems. To make this argument, I describe three central practices of school-based support processes and explore how young people's voices might (re)shape these practices. I begin by investigating the practice of “referring in,” the ways in which students are invited into and included in school-based support processes. I highlight the need for making students’ voices central in the referral process. Next, I investigate the practice of “referring out” students to school- and community-based providers—the professionalization of help. Here, I highlight the importance of trust and fit in facilitating effective support relationships. Finally, I explore the practice of “referring up” by examining the hierarchies of mandated reporting that exist in schools. I conclude with the argument that adults and youth must collaborate to improve information-sharing systems.
Changing Our Selves, Our Schools, and Our School System: Students Take on the New York City Quality Review Process
Authors: Parham Shamika , Mcbroom Aravis
Published: November 2021

This chapter focuses on student voice in the school evaluation process. The New York City Department of Education conducts annual Quality Reviews of K–12 public schools to evaluate their effectiveness. Throughout the two- or three-day school visit, reviewers meet with school leaders, teachers, students, and parents and observe classrooms. The review results in a final score and a report, which are both shared with the public. In 2012, as members of the Student Voice Collaborative (SVC), we were given the opportunity to participate in Quality Reviews as the first student shadows ever. This initiative was part of SVC's yearlong effort to answer the question, “What is student voice?” through first-hand research. In this chapter, we explain how we used the results of our research to design a student voice rubric to help guide our collaborative school improvement work. We share how our rubric informed and was informed by our shadowing experiences, and we detail the ways in which our involvement in SVC has impacted us, our schools, and the school system, particularly as we recommended changes to the Quality Review process.
Introduction to Student Voice in American Education Policy
Authors: Conner Jerusha O. , Ebby-Rosin Rachel , Brown Amanda S.
Published: November 2021

This introduction sets up the volume by defining student voice, reviewing the philosophical and theoretical warrants for it, briefly summarizing the history of the movement in the United States, and synthesizing extant research on the topic. It also explains the tripartite structure of the book (Discovering, Developing, and Demonstrating the Power of Student Voice) and previews the chapters to come. The student voice initiatives analyzed in this volume represent a powerful new model of education reform—one in which students assume an active, integral role. No longer can students be cast simply as the targets of educational policies and the passive beneficiaries of educational processes. As students across the country add their voices to policy debates and assume critical roles as educational innovators, analysts, researchers, and agents of change—not just in their schools, but on local, state, and national stages—they are shaping education policy in powerful ways. Though student voice may be a trendy term in some educational circles, these students’ efforts to make their schools and the school system more responsive to their needs show student voice to be both a serious and a significant reform strategy.
Student Voice and the Common Core
Authors: Yonezawa Susan
Published: November 2021

Replacing a discrete, sometimes lengthy list of topics to learn, the Common Core asks teachers to help students develop high-level cognitive skills: to persist, model, critique, reason, argue, explain, justify, and synthesize. Faced with this challenge, teachers are wondering what they can do to help students to meet the new standards and prepare for 21st-century careers. Research on student voice can provide some answers and inform the conversation about Common Core implementation. Over the past two decades, researchers, students, and educators have teamed up across a variety of projects and places to provide us with what kids say they need to engage deeply in their studies. Interestingly, what students have long told us they want in classroom curriculum and pedagogy resonates with Common Core principles. As educators work to implement the Common Core, student voice can offer useful guidance as well as concrete examples of the schoolwork students find most challenging, engaging, relevant, and educational.

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.

—Common Core State Standards Initiative mission statement
The Student Voice Collaborative: An Effort to Systematize Student Participation in School and District Improvement
Authors: Sussman Ari
Published: November 2021

Alienation from school improvement processes can lead students to disengage and disinvest in school. Through the creation of the Student Voice Collaborative (SVC) in New York City, an educational leadership program, high school students have partnered with teachers and principals as well as administrators in the New York City Department of Education to address educational issues that matter most to them. Their collective work has led to concrete changes in school and district practices, including the district-wide revision of a tool used to evaluate elementary, middle, and high schools. Students, too, have undergone personal transformation as they have strengthened their skills and realized their ability to effect meaningful change. In this chapter, the author and founder of SVC, Ari Sussman, recounts the program's first three years, noting its setbacks and accomplishments. He then describes the shared school-level governance model SVC has developed, the process it uses to launch and sustain campaigns, and nine design and implementation principles that can guide the work of others seeking to institutionalize student voice in schools and school systems.
Drowning Digitally? How Disequilibrium Shapes Practice in a Blended Learning Charter School
Authors: Bingham Andrea J.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Blended learning—a learning model in which online learning is combined with face-to-face instruction to provide a more personalized learning experience for students—has shown enormous growth in recent years. Though many policymakers and educators are optimistic about the potential of blended learning to provide the type of personalized education encouraged by current policy (Race to the Top, ConnectED, etc.), few studies have investigated blended learning in K—12 contexts beyond questions of effects.

Purpose/Objective

This qualitative case study examines the execution of a blended school model to understand teachers’ roles and practices in that environment. In this article, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) provides the framework for tracing how instructional practices and teachers’ roles develop throughout the first year of the school and for understanding how contextual factors interact to influence this development.

Research Design

This article reports findings from the first year of an ongoing qualitative case study, designed to examine teachers’ instructional roles and practices in a blended charter high school. The research team collected a variety of data in order to garner a rich, deep understanding of the contextualized experiences of teachers, including more than 60 observations; two rounds of interviews; and a year's worth of email correspondence, documents, and artifacts.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The original vision for teacher practice broke down to varying levels in each classroom, with all teachers exhibiting a return to the pedagogical roles and practices with which they were most comfortable. The tensions, frustrations, and contradictions experienced by teachers throughout the year demonstrate the need for better planning and professional development prior to the full enactment of a new school model, particularly one in which technology plays a large role. For example, administrators and teachers must address how teachers will know that students are using technology productively. Further, because teachers’ roles may change in a blended school, these roles need to be defined, and teachers need to be provided with support and training around these roles first, before the students show up. In addition, if an online curriculum is expected to bear the responsibility of assessment and data production, it must first be vetted to ensure that the assessments are rigorous and the data is accurate. Finally, there needs to be planning around how the classroom space should be organized to promote learning, how students will be trained to self-direct, and how teachers will facilitate learning.
Reflections on Brown to Understand Milliken v. Bradley: What If We are Focusing on the Wrong Policy Questions?
Authors: Milner H. Richard , Delale-O'Connor Lori A. , Murray Ira E. , Farinde Abiola A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Prior research on Milliken v. Bradley focuses on the failure of this case to implement interdistrict busing in the highly segregated Detroit schools. Much of this work focuses explicitly on desegregation, rather than on equity and addressing individual, systemic, institutional, and organizational challenges that may prevent the advancement and actualization of desegregation to benefit Black students, teachers, and communities.

Purpose/Objective

In this study, we shed light on the impacts of desegregation on Black students, teachers, and communities. We argue that Brown, Milliken, and associated policies that attempt to address segregation focus mostly on student assignment policies. Our focus instead is on highlighting the underconceptualized microlevel realities of desegregation, which include the losses of cultural and community connections, strong role models, and connections to school.

Population/Participants

This study draws from interview data collected from three experts in the field of education whose research focuses on school desegregation. The interview participants have written scholarly articles and/or book chapters about desegregation and related influences on/for Black teachers, Black students, and Black communities spanning the PreK–12 and higher education spectrum.

Research Design

This study employs in-depth qualitative interviewing.

Data Collection and Analysis

Interviews were conducted by phone and lasted approximately 45 minutes to an hour. Participants in the study were asked questions about the impact of desegregation and education on Black teachers’ experience, self-concept, dedication, and retention; Black students’ experience of schools and school-related success; experience and connection of Black communities; and “next steps” in educating Black students. An interpretive perspective was used to guide the interview analyses in this study.

Findings/Results

Analysis of the expert interviews reveals the underexplored microlevel losses and harmful effects of desegregation policies and politics on Black children, families, and communities.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Evidence from these researchers who have studied desegregation suggests that for many Black students and educators, desegregation was unsuccessful— even when there were superficial indicators of success. We suggest that both researchers and policy makers should consider drawing from the potential losses associated with desegregation and focusing on equity, regardless of schooling location and population.
Relational Teaching with Black Boys: Strategies for Learning at a Single-Sex Middle School for Boys of Color
Authors: Nelson Joseph Derrick
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Positive teacher-student relationships are critical for Black boys’ learning across single-sex and coeducational environments. Limited attention to these relationships by school professionals is rooted in deficit-oriented conceptions of boyhood and Black masculinity. The popular message of deficiency and pathology is clear: Black boys and men are either dangerous or at-risk and need to be saved. Such narrow conceptions are destructive, operate unconsciously, skew teachers’ perceptions of who boys are, and distort teachers’ efforts to meet boys’ distinct learning needs. A “boy crisis” in U.S. education has been characterized by a set of distressing school outcomes in specific learning categories. Racial marginalization and poverty only serve to exacerbate these negative academic outcomes, whereby low-income Black boys remain in the bottom quartile across all achievement measures. Scholars have recently begun to partly attribute boys’ underachievement to a lack of emphasis on the relational dimension of schools.

Purpose/Focus of the Study

(1) Illustrate how a set of relational teaching strategies supported Black boys’ engagement and learning, and (2) further contribute boys’ “voice” to a counternarrative, which strives to complicate and dispel negative race and gender stereotypes associated with Black males in the United States.

Setting/Population/Participants

This study employs a relational teaching framework to examine the learning relationships among teachers and a full cohort of eighth-grade Black boys (N = 27) at a single-sex middle school for boys of color in New York City.

Research Design/Data Collection

In-depth interviews from a critical ethnography conducted at the school-site (2011–2012) culled boys’ narratives of their teacher-student relationships.

Findings/Discussion

Boys particularly expressed how teachers must foremost convey mastery of course content, with a lucid set of humane behavioral expectations. Narratives from the boys revealed how relationally effective teachers consistently enacted the following gestures: reaching out and go beyond; personal advocacy; establishing common ground; and accommodating opposition. Teachers demonstrated the capacity to acquire and refine relational gestures, but relationship struggles among the boys and their teachers were commonplace. Core findings include: (a) Boys illuminated how specific aspects of the school context facilitated successful enactment of the relational teaching strategies by teachers; (b) teachers’ use of the relational strategies was also facilitated by the social categories of race, gender, and class the boys embodied; (c) boys’ engagement and learning benefitted from positive teacher–student relationships, which ensued after effective use of the relational teaching strategies; and (d) relational teaching with Black boys is not limited to either single-sex or coeducational learning environments.
Does Attending a Low-Achieving School Affect High-Performing Student Outcomes?
Authors: Parsons Eric
Published: November 2021

Background

Ability tracking in K–12 education has been the subject of much research over the past decades, with proponents arguing that it allows for better instructional targeting and opponents countering that it has the potential to increase inequality. Despite the large volume or research on the topic, however, there is little consensus on the actual impact of ability tracking on student outcomes.

Objective/Focus of Study

This article expands on the tracking literature by exploring the impacts on high-achieving students of a type of tracking that has previously been ignored in research—de facto tracking that occurs at the school-level as the result of residential segregation and other factors. High-achieving students represent an important population that may be particularly affected by this type of tracking. To explore whether attending a low-achieving school impacts high-achieving students, two primary outcomes are examined—middle school standardized exam performance and the grade in which high-achieving students take Algebra I.

Research Design

I employ a secondary analysis of data taken from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's statewide longitudinal data system, following a cohort of 6,151 initially high-performing Missouri students from the time of their first statewide standardized exam (grade 3) through their entry into high school (grade 9). The research design incorporates regression analysis using a rich set of student and school control variables and value-added modeling methods.

Findings

Two key findings emerge from the analysis. First, attending a low-achieving school does not affect the standardized exam performance of initially high-performing students once school quality (as measured by value-added) is accounted for. Second, high-performing students who attend low-achieving schools are more likely to take Algebra I later relative to their counterparts who attend higher-achieving schools.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Since de facto school-level tracking appears to have little effect on test scores through grade 8, policy at the elementary level should focus on improving overall school quality, rather than issues of student placement in schools. However, as high performers move into the middle and upper grades, transfer and distance learning policies that encourage high-performing students in low-achieving schools to take more academically-advanced coursework should be considered. Interventions of this nature have the potential to produce substantial benefits in terms of college readiness.
Getting to Scale: Ideas, Opportunities, and Resources in the Early Diffusion of the Charter Management Organization, 1999–2006
Authors: Quinn Rand , Oelberger Carrie R. , Meyerson Debra
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The concept of scale has gained purchase across social sectors in recent years as organizational leaders and funders seek to maximize the impact of promising social innovations.

Purpose/Objective

We apply insights from recent scholarship on ideas as mechanisms for change to explain how the idea of “getting to scale” intersected with political opportunities and human and financial resources in the early diffusion of the charter management organization (CMO).

Research Design

As the birthplace and a political locus of the CMO form, California is an ideal vantage point from which to understand the early years of the form's diffusion. We conducted interviews with California CMO and non-CMO leaders, principals, and funders. Our interviews were designed to understand when and why CMO leaders thought about growth, the challenges and opportunities associated with growth, organizational goals and strategic priorities, and whether and how funders shaped CMO development and plans. In addition, we constructed a school-level panel dataset for the 1991–92 to 2006–07 school years using data from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data and the California Department of Education. We included charter organizational form, enrollment, and school founding and closure years. We also joined multiple Foundation Center datasets to create a grant-level dataset for the years 1999 to 2006 that includes grant amount, grant type, recipient, and funder. Finally, we conducted participant and nonpar-ticipant observations at CMO board meetings, foundation staff meetings and presentations, and charter school conferences and meetings.

Findings/Results

Understood and framed as the vehicle for getting to scale, the CMO form drew a disproportionate share of private philanthropy dollars, appealed to a new class of professionals from outside of education, and was successfully distinguished from alternative charter forms, all of which contributed to its early diffusion.

Conclusions/Recommendations

We develop a fuller understanding of the charter school movement, describing how the diffusion of the CMO form displaced ideas about school-level autonomy and decentralization in favor of ideas about getting to scale and tipping the system. The study also offers insight to scholars analyzing current and past efforts at educational reform by emphasizing the roles played by ideas, opportunities, and resources.