bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Supporting Teachers’ Equity-Oriented Learning and Identities: A Resource-Centered Perspective
Authors: Louie Nicole L.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Despite calls for equity in education, the dominant mode of schooling reproduces hierarchies, positioning some students as bright, gifted, or fast learners and others as lazy, in need of remediation, or slow. A number of studies have shown that teachers’ professional communities and networks can address this problem and enhance outcomes for all students. However, more research is needed not only to show the structure of supportive networks but also to explain the mechanisms through which they foster teacher learning.

Research Questions

This paper addresses three questions: (a) Where do teachers encounter resources that support their engagement with nondominant, equity-oriented teaching practice? (b) What kinds of resources support teachers’ engagement with nondominant teaching practice? and (c) How do different kinds of resources come together to support teachers’ patterns of engagement with communities of nondominant teaching practice?

Research Design

A multisite case study was conducted over the course of an academic year. The study involved extensive observations in routine teacher meetings and professional development settings, as well as classroom observations and teacher interviews.

Participants

Participants included 18 mathematics teachers from two diverse urban high schools. The mathematics departments at both schools expressed commitments to professional learning and collaboration in order to better serve their diverse student bodies, in particular, to support students who had previously been unsuccessful. Six teachers were selected as focal teachers for more in-depth observation and interviewing. This paper describes the contrasting cases of four teachers.

Findings

Two of the focal teachers maintained close engagement with nondominant, equity-oriented practice throughout the period of the study, while two did not. A comparison of teachers’ professional support networks showed that their patterns of engagement were related to their connections to sources outside their school-based communities and the access that these connections provided to four distinct types of resources. The two teachers who maintained their engagement with reforms were found to have abundant and personally significant identity resources, which were critical for their ongoing learning. Although the other two teachers had technical resources for engaging with reforms, they did not have such identity resources.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Research and practice have tended to focus on technical aspects of teacher learning in service of reform. This paper suggests that teachers need not only more resources, but also more kinds of resources in order to sustain the learning that student-centered, equity-oriented reforms require.
Teach for America Placement and Teacher Vacancies: Evidence from the Mississippi Delta
Authors: Curran F. Chris
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Teach for America (TFA) represents an influential yet controversial preparation route for new teachers. In recent years, TFA has received criticism from traditionally trained teachers and schools of education on the basis that they are crowding out or taking positions away from non-TFA teachers. Despite this criticism, research on TFA has tended to focus on its impact on student outcomes rather than on its implications for teacher labor markets.

Research Questions

This study explores the relationship between TFA placement in school districts in the Mississippi Delta and district advertised vacancies to provide the first evidence on the impact of TFA on teacher labor market outcomes. The questions addressed include the following: What is the relationship between TFA presence in a Mississippi school district and the number of district vacancies advertised through the state board of education? Do these relationships vary by characteristics of the vacancy such as grade level or subject area?

Setting

This study uses data on school districts in the state of Mississippi for an 11-year period from 2001 through 2011.

Research Design

This study utilizes two primary analytic strategies. The first encompasses school district and year fixed effects with a series of time-varying control variables to identify the impact of TFA placement off changes in the use of TFA by districts over time. The second approach capitalizes on an abrupt increase in the presence of TFA in Mississippi starting in 2009 by using a difference-in-differences design. A series of robustness and sensitivity checks are also included.

Findings/Results

The results indicate that the presence of TFA in a district predicts approximately 11 fewer advertised vacancies per year per district and that each additional TFA teacher placed in a district predicts approximately one less advertised vacancy.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The results indicate that in the Mississippi Delta, TFA appears to be filling teacher vacancies. This suggests that the continued use of TFA by districts may be a viable solution to addressing teacher shortages.
Leveraging Big Data to Help Each Learner and Accelerate Learning Science
Authors: Winne Philip H.
Published: November 2021

Background

Today's gold standard for identifying what works, the randomized controlled trial, poorly serves each and any individual learner. Elements of my argument provide grounds for proposed remedies in cases where software can log extensive data about operations each learner applies to learn and each bit of information to which a learner applies those operations.

Purpose of Study

Analyses of such big data can produce learning analytics that provide raw material for self-regulating learners, for instructors to productively adapt instructional designs, and for learning scientists to advance learning science. I describe an example of such a software system, nStudy.

Research Design

I describe and analyze features of nStudy, including bookmarks, quotes, notes, and note artifacts that can be used to generate trace data.

Results

By using software like nStudy as they study, learners can partner with instructors and learning scientists in a symbiotic and progressive ecology of authentic experimentation.

Conclusion

I argue that software technologies like nStudy offer significant value in supporting learners and advancing learning science. A rationale and recommendations for this approach arise from my critique of pseudo-random controlled trials.
Maya Loves Tubby and you Should Too, If you Want to Understand and Evaluate Children's Math Learning in the Digital Age
Authors: Ginsburg Herbert P.
Published: November 2021

Background

This article describes a detailed, hypothetical, but quite plausible account of how one child, Maya, made use of math learning software on a touch screen device (Tubby).

Focus of Study

The author discusses the kind of research that is possible and necessary to understand children's learning in the digital age, and how that research can contribute to the development of even more effective educational software, and can also largely eliminate the need for high-stakes testing and standard achievement tests.

Research Design

Research of this type will require use of complex statistical techniques as well as qualitative methods, such as case studies. The tablet can provide detailed descriptions of children's engagement in the various activities. Tubby can also be used for summative research that provides a valuable portrait of the child's learning over the course of the year.

Conclusion

Computers can, in principle, engage children in meaningful learning and at the same time provide educators with the tools for understanding, improving, evaluating, and assessing children's learning.
Deciding about College: How Soon is Soon Enough?
Authors: Harding Jeffrey L. , Parker Maggie C. , Toutkoushian Robert K.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Prior research has stressed the importance of timing in the college choice process, especially as it relates to receiving early information and making plans and decisions. Little has been done, however, in terms of empirically demonstrating how soon students make their decisions about college and the ways in which the timing of student decisions are related to planning behaviors.

Focus of Study

This paper examines the relationships between the timing of decisions related to college attendance and outcomes such as aspirations, course-taking patterns in high school, and eventual college application. It also considers how the timing and various sources of information are related to when students make these decisions.

Research Design

This study provides secondary statistical analysis of data obtained from a statewide survey of high school seniors in New Hampshire during the spring of the 2004– 2005 school year.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Findings suggest that the dominant model of college choice involving predisposition, search, and choice should be updated to acknowledge that predisposition may begin much earlier than the literature has typically considered. To wit, many students begin gathering information and making decisions about postsecondary education as early as elementary school. Additional resources should be dispatched to address the needs of economically disadvantaged and first-generation students who often lack the types of human, social, and financial capital needed to make the most of their early educational opportunities.
“That's Where the Rubber Meets the Road”: The Intersection of Special Education and Dual Language Education
Authors: Kangas Sara E. N.
Published: November 2021

Background

English language learners (ELLs) with special needs remain an underresearched student population. Although providing services to these students proves to be a daunting task, bilingual schools are uniquely poised to meet the educational needs of ELLs with special needs. Yet, research has not explored service provision practices in bilingual contexts for ELLs with special needs.

Purpose of Study

This study examined the service provision practices of a bilingual school for ELLs with special needs and how these practices shaped the educational opportunities of these students.

Research Design

This study is an ethnographic case study of a charter bilingual elementary school.

Data Collection and Analysis

Fieldwork lasted for a majority of one academic year with the following data collected: classroom observations, interviews with staff, participation in meetings and informal conversations with staff, and school artifacts. The data were analyzed through an intersectionality framework, examining how disability and primary language resulted in multiple disadvantages for ELLs with special needs.

Findings

That data analysis revealed how providing services to ELLs with special needs is fraught with challenges and compromises. Specifically, despite the school's commitment to bilingualism, ideological and material conditions in the school worked in concert to restrict the access of ELLs with special needs to bilingual and academic support. The findings also illuminated how in an attempt to provide services, the school was enacting a de facto policy that both disregarded the bilingual development of ELLs with special needs and misappropriated effective models of bilingual and special education.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The study argues that when schools prioritize language and special education services in parity, educational opportunities for ELLs with special needs will improve. This study also asserts that the educational opportunities of ELLs with special needs are contingent upon the implementation of bilingual and special education programs with fidelity. Thus, to best prepare schools to serve ELLs with special needs, teacher education programs need to dedicate more attention to developing in-service and preservice teachers’ interdisciplinary knowledge about these students and their educational needs and rights.
Crafting Legitimacy in District–Community Partnerships
Authors: Lechasseur Kimberly
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Partnering across districts, schools, and other community organizations has become ubiquitous as a policy for promoting change. Despite growing attention to and scholarship on district–community partnerships, there is little examination of the organizational mechanisms involved in sustaining them.

Purpose/Objectives

This study examines the ways in which district–community partnerships establish and sustain legitimacy with multiple constituencies over time. Drawing on institutional theory, these analyses extend current theories of legitimation by describing the legitimacy-building events of districts and their community partners as they craft partnerships over time.

Research Design

I used a qualitative multi-case-study design to build grounded theory based on three district–community partnerships. Interviews with partnership leaders, focus groups with governance team members, and observations were collected between 2012 and 2014. Thematic analysis was conducted within and across the three cases to identify legitimacy-building activities.

Findings/Results

Five mechanisms for building legitimacy emerged across the three district–community partnerships: funder endorsement, attention to reciprocity, service provision, dedicated formal staff roles, and a systems-building approach. Each mechanism was deployed across the stages of partnership (e.g., identity formation, recruitment, sustainability). These mechanisms were used to leverage legitimacy with one stakeholder group to build new legitimacy with other stakeholder groups, creating complex chains of legitimacy across partners over time.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The findings extend current research on both legitimacy frameworks and the use of community partnerships in education reform. Themes across cases highlight the recursive nature of legitimacy during the recruitment of new partners, how partnerships can build legitimacy across cultural divides, and the role of external funders in supporting legitimacy building across multiple sets of stakeholders.
Flows of Literacy across Corporate and User-Produced Virtual Worlds
Authors: Black Rebecca W. , Alexander Jonathan , Korobkova Ksenia A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Sociocultural research on young people's literate practices with digital media has generally focused on literacy events and practices that are grounded in distinct online locations, such as affinity spaces, specific websites, particular videogames, or virtual worlds.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

Contemporary media landscapes have become networked to such an extent that a transmedial approach is needed to understand the social, cultural, and literate contexts that young people inhabit.

Research Design

In this article, we use qualitative and literary analyses of products and artifacts from the Hunger Games media franchise to explore young people's literacy practices as embedded in corporate and fan-produced transmedia ecologies.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Our analysis looks beyond spatial and structural boundaries to understand how flows of corporate and user-produced artifacts can shape, constrain, and expand young people's literate repertoires.
Games as Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems
Authors: Gee Elisabeth , Gee James Paul
Published: November 2021

Background

Videogames and virtual worlds have frequently been studied as learning environments in isolation; that is, scholars have focused on understanding the features of games or virtual worlds as separate from or different than “real world” environments for learning. Although more recently, scholars have explored the teaching and learning that take place around games and virtual worlds, for example, in affinity spaces, these too have been treated as separate and often divorced from other learning experiences.

Purpose

Our goal in this article is to describe learning from experience, the nature of digital games, and distributed systems of teaching and learning in an integrated way that transcends dichotomies of online and offline activities or spaces.

Research Design

This article offers a theoretical framework in which to understand some aspects of teaching and learning outside of school today. Drawing on contemporary theories of how the mind works, we identify the central role of embodied experience in human thought and learning. We use videogames as examples of how real and virtual experiences are mediated in similar ways by good tools and social interactions. We argue that videogames and virtual worlds offer opportunities for new types of “conversations” with other people, with virtual worlds, and with the “real” world, conversations that extend humans’ abilities to learn from experiences. We then examine how experiences with games and virtual worlds are located and interpreted within broader, dynamic systems of social relations, technologies, practices, teaching, and learning.

Conclusions

Understanding our experiences with videogames and virtual worlds as distinctive forms of conversations with the world, situated within distributed teaching and learning systems, offers us a new means of understanding their potential significance in people's lives for learning, belonging, and problem solving.
How We Live Now: “I Don't Think There's Such a Thing as Being Offline”
Authors: Carrington Victoria
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Distinctions, real and conceptual, in being “online” or “offline” have featured heavily in the ways educational researchers have understood and approached research into the lives and practices of young people. Even as we argued that bridges must be built between “on” and “off,” our research has reflected a set of deeply entrenched metaphors about the Internet.

Focus of Study

This article takes a qualitative approach, using semistructured interviews and object ethnographies within a postphenomenological theoretical frame to explore how contemporary young people understand and experience “the Internet” and “online–offline” alongside their engagement with ubiquitous smartphones. Here, the article positions itself in the emerging new materialism studies alongside speculative realism and posthumanism, but with a particular focus on where the philosophy of technology known as postphenomenology can lead us in our thinking.

Research Design

The interviews described here were conducted in English and form part of a larger ongoing research project focused on understanding the impacts of mobile digital technologies on young people, including tracking shifts in the metaphors used to explain their everyday lives with digital media. To date, the project includes 41 surveys and a dozen semistructured interviews conducted in person in the United Kingdom and Europe, or, where necessary, via Skype and/or email. The interviews described here were conducted in person in 2015 in England. Analysis was conducted via critical discourse analysis and metaphor analysis.

Conclusions

The article demonstrates that our dated metaphors of online/offline are no longer fit for purpose when speaking about the activities, practices, beliefs, and priorities of these young women. The views of these young women are illuminating and challenging, and they pave the way for how we might usefully theorize the practices with text and technologies that they carry across different presences.
Monster High as a Virtual Dollhouse: Tracking Play Practices across Converging Transmedia and Social Media
Authors: Wohlwend Karen E.
Published: November 2021

Background

Today, children play in transmedia franchises that bring together media characters, toys, and everyday consumer goods with games, apps, and websites in complex mergers of childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas. Recent research on youth videogames and virtual worlds suggests the productive possibilities and tensions in children's imaginative engagements on these commercial playgrounds.

Purpose

Transmedia websites are conceptualized and analyzed as virtual dollhouses, or assemblages of toys, stories, and imagination that converge digital media, popular media, and social media. In this framing, transmedia websites are not texts to be read but contexts to inhabit. Are virtual dollhouses safe places where children can reimagine the worlds they know and play the worlds they imagine? Are girls doing more than playing simple repetitive games, dressing up avatars, caring for pets, and decorating rooms in virtual dollhouses?

Research Design

Nexus analysis tracks the histories and social functions of traditional doll-houses, then examines the monsterhigh.com website for these functions and converging practices. In nexus analysis, when practices repeat or support one another across imaginaries, shared normative expectations for ideal players and performances are thickened and amplified. Similarly, conflicting practices create ruptures that disrupt expected trajectories and usual ways of doing things. Nexus analysis of website and game designs and children's YouTube videos identifies repetitions of social practices with the dolls in the commercial website and in child-made films on YouTube social media, making visible the resonances across converging cultural imaginaries as well as ruptures that open opportunities for player agency and redesign.

Conclusions

As children engage the pretense of virtual dollhouses, they play out blended activities that are at once both simulated and real: dressing their avatars, creating imagined profiles, shopping, playing games, purchasing in-app goods, watching and “liking” videos, recruiting followers/friends, and affiliating with the brand and other fans. These lived-in practices align with particular visions of girlhood that circulate naturalized and normalizing expectations for girls that also converge in these concentrations of media. However, examination of the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media shows that players also make use of the complexity that convergence produces. Children remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture these expectations. The analysis points up the need for (a) nuanced and expanded research on children's transmedia engagements, (b) productive play and digital literacies, and (c) critical media literacy in schools.
What Teachers Know and Do about Assessing Students’ Self-Regulated Learning
Authors: Michalsky Tova
Published: November 2021

To foster their students’ self-regulated learning (SRL), teachers’ lesson goals should include not only SRL teaching but also assessment of students’ SRL behaviors/processes to verify whether teachers achieved their goals. This article presents a study that sought to examine teachers’ knowledge about SRL assessment, actual assessment of SRL in their classrooms, and the predictive value of teachers’ knowledge on their behavior. High school teachers in Israel (N = 236) completed self-report questionnaires on knowledge and behavior for implementing SRL assessment in their classrooms. Results indicated that teachers knew more about offline assessment of SRL aptitude than about online or offline assessments of SRL events. Not all SRL assessment methods were well known to all teachers. Furthermore, teachers’ knowledge differed from their self-reported behavior in assessing their students’ SRL. Findings indicated how teacher education could support teachers to learn how to assess SRL effectively, in line with clear recommendations in the empirical literature regarding the value of assessment alongside curriculum and pedagogy.
Stereotypes, Images, and Inclination to Discriminatory Action: The White Racial Frame in the Practice of School Leadership
Authors: Toure Judith , Dorsey Dana N. Thompson
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Most educators have had little if any preparation in racial literacy, the understanding of social identity related to race and the ability to recognize and negotiate racism. In fact, they may view race as irrelevant. Yet teachers and school leaders hold deep-seated racial ideologies that shape their day-to-day practice and have implications for their students’ learning and success This study presents an analysis of school leadership in three, predominantly African-American schools, and the constructions of race, learning, and leadership.

Purpose

The authors draw from Feagin's (2010) conceptual framework, the White racial frame (WRF), to analyze school leadership practice and ways in which racial ideologies emerge and shape leaders’ work with teachers. The WRF consists of five dimensions including racial stereotypes, racial narratives and interpretations, racial images and language accents, racialized emotions, and inclinations to discriminatory action.

Context and Participants

This study took place in three schools in two urban districts in western Pennsylvania. Participants included three White school principals, instructional leaders, and several focal teachers.

Research Design, Data Collection, and Analysis

This ethnographic case study is part of a larger study that took place in three predominantly African-American elementary schools. More than 80 hours of school-based observations took place, by shadowing each principal weekly and observing her in various capacities as she supervised teachers, led walkthroughs and faculty meetings, and attended or provided professional development. Additionally, multiple interviews of the school leaders and focal teachers were conducted to surface beliefs about race, knowledge of culture and learning, and knowledge of teachers’ cultural competence. We developed a coding scheme based upon Feagin's (2010) paradigm of the WRF to surface leadership beliefs and practice and used a qualitative data analysis software package to analyze our data.

Findings

The school leaders in this study were deeply rooted within the WRF in their daily leadership routines, perpetuating stereotypes and justifying discriminatory actions in the school, ultimately limiting learning opportunities for children of color and for teachers.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The findings underscore the need for critical knowledge of race and racism to be included in teacher and leadership preparation and professional development. The WRF serves as a fine-grained analytic tool for understanding how racial ideologies surface in leadership. The authors recommend that future research explore the role of school leaders in deframing and reframing the White racial frame and develop the concept of racial literacy in educational contexts.
Teacher Turnover in Organizational Context: Staffing Stability in Los Angeles Charter, Magnet, and Regular Public Schools
Authors: Newton Xiaoxia , Rivero Rosario , Fuller Bruce , Dauter Luke
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Studies that compare the achievement benefits of charter public schools versus traditional public schools (TPSs) yield quite uneven results. The quality and long-term commitment of teachers represent related mediators that may help to explain effective and ineffective charter schools. Early findings on the comparative rates of annual turnover—exiting from one's school—appear to show higher turnover in charter schools relative to TPSs. But longitudinal data that allow scholars to track teachers over time remain rare. Little evidence exists on how organizational context may interact with individual teacher characteristics to further explain the propensity to leave one's school.

Purpose/Objective

Prior research on teacher turnover focused mostly on whether or not and who leaves. Our research builds on and extends prior studies by investigating not only whether and who but also when a teacher leaves. The phenomenon of our study emphasizes the dynamic nature of teacher exit; namely, we are interested in examining when teachers are at the greatest risk of exiting schools. This dynamic focus marks a departure from the typical teacher turnover analysis in which exit is conceptualized as a status (i.e., exit or not).

Population/Participants/Subjects

We used a large sample of elementary (4,788) and secondary teachers (8,467) panel data (from 2002–03 to 2008–09) from the LAUSD. A little over 80% of the teachers in the elementary sample were female, while 61% of the secondary teachers were female. About 40% of the elementary and 47% of the secondary teachers were white. The average years of teaching experience was about two for both elementary and secondary teachers. Special education teachers accounted for 12% of the elementary and 15% of the secondary study sample, respectively.

Research Design

We combined event history and multilevel modeling analysis in order to investigate when a teacher exits his or her first assigned school and how organizational membership conditions decision processes at the individual level.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The longitudinal and multilevel analysis of teacher turnover supports our theoretical position that organizational dynamics and contextual factors are likely to condition the decision process made at the individual level and thereby influence individual behaviors (i.e., decision to leave a school at certain point in time). This cross-level theoretical perspective adds further support to the argument that focusing on recruiting capable teachers and paying attention to working conditions for long-term staffing stability are aspects of schooling that matter most for student learning, as opposed to a horse-race game (i.e., choice and competition).
Crossing Boundaries: A Qualitative Exploration of Relational Leadership in Three Full-Service Community Schools
Authors: Sanders Mavis G.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Full-service community schools provide comprehensive and coordinated resources and supports to meet the complex needs of children and families in low-income communities. Given their intentional focus on expanded networks of school, family, and community stakeholders, full-service community schools are particularly useful contexts for studying leadership strategies that facilitate cross-boundary collaboration.

Focus of Study

Drawing from the literature on three interrelated concepts—cross-boundary leadership, relational leadership, and relational trust—this study examines principal leadership practices in three full-service community schools.

Setting

The study took place in an urban school district in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States and included three full-service community schools—one elementary school and two secondary schools. The three full-service community schools were purposefully selected to provide both a range and depth of insights.

Research Design

Consistent with a constructivist perspective, this qualitative, multiple case study was designed to understand conditions influencing the effectiveness of full-service community schools from the perspectives of those involved in their development, implementation, and use.

Data Collection and Analysis

Data collection included semistructured interviews, school observations, and document review. Triangulation of data sources and methods helped to generate a more nuanced account of the principals’ leadership practices. Data analysis was an iterative process, including both inductive and deductive strategies.

Findings

The focal principals, to varying degrees, used three relational leadership strategies—active engagement with diverse stakeholders, facilitation of stakeholder interaction, and purposive selection of faculty and staff—to build and maintain collaborative school cultures; attract partnerships that provided services and supports to students, families, teachers, and community members; and garner political support and funding for continued implementation of the full-service community school model in the district. At each school, the principals were also called on to address conflicts that threatened the collaborative environments they sought to create. Their success in doing so influenced both stability and trust within the case schools.

Conclusions/Recommendations

This study underscores the need for a continued focus on relational practices in school leadership programs and research, specifically on strategies to build the interpersonal relationships and organizational conditions that are critical for cross-boundary collaboration and to effectively manage interactor conflicts.
Teacher Talk about Student Ability and Achievement in the Era of Data-Driven Decision Making
Authors: Datnow Amanda , Choi Bailey , Park Vicki , John Elise ST.
Published: November 2021

Background

Data-driven decision making continues to be a common feature of educational reform agendas across the globe. In many U.S. schools, the teacher team meeting is a key setting in which data use is intended to take place, with the aim of planning instruction to address students’ needs. However, most prior research has not examined how the use of data shapes teachers’ dialogue about their students’ ability and achievement.

Purpose

This study examines how teachers talk about student ability and achievement in the era of data-driven decision making and how their talk is shaped by the use of data within teams, their school contexts, and broader accountability systems.

Research Design

The study draws on interview and observational data gathered from teacher teams in four elementary schools. In each of these schools, teachers were expected to use data to inform instructional differentiation. Data collection efforts involved regular visits to each school over the course of one year to interview teachers and conduct observations of teacher team meetings. In the process of analysis, interview transcripts and field notes were coded, and themes were extracted within and across codes.

Findings

Across schools, teachers used common labels (e.g., “low,” “middle,” “GATE”) to describe students of different achievement levels and the programs they were involved in. The use of labels and student categories was relational and comparative and influenced by the accountability and policy contexts in which teachers worked. At the same time, regular meetings in which teachers jointly examined data on student learning provided a space for teachers to examine students’ strengths and weaknesses on a variety of measures and talk in terms of student growth. Teachers questioned whether assessment data provided an accurate picture of student achievement and acknowledged the role of student effort, behavior, and family circumstances as important factors that were not easily measured. These discussions opened up deeper inquiry into the factors that supported or hindered student learning. The implementation of the Common Core State Standards also led some teachers to question prior categorizations of student ability.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The findings from this study suggest that educational reforms and policies regarding data use influence educators’ conceptions of student achievement and ability. On the one hand, accountability policies can narrow the dialogue about students. On the other hand, educational reforms and policies could also lead to new ways of thinking about student learning and to an examination of a broader range of data, and provide opportunities for professional learning.
Ending Isolation: The Payoff of Teacher Teams in Successful High-Poverty Urban Schools
Authors: Johnson Susan Moore , Reinhorn Stefanie , Simon Nicole
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Many urban schools today look to instructional teams as a means to decrease professional isolation, promote teachers’ ongoing development, and substantially reduce well-documented variation in teachers’ effectiveness across classrooms. Recent research finds that teams can contribute to teachers’ development and increased student achievement. However, research also suggests that teams often fail and that most schools are not organized to ensure their success. Therefore, it is important to learn more about how teams function in successful schools, how teachers experience them, and what factors contribute to their success.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

Data for this article were drawn from a comparative case study focusing on the human-capital practices in six successful high-poverty, high-minority schools (traditional, turnaround, restart, and charter), all located in one Massachusetts city. Each school was affected by a distinct set of state and local policies. Here, we focus on the schools’ approaches to professional learning and collaboration among teachers. Did they rely on teams, and, if so, what purposes did the teams serve, and how were they organized? How did teachers assess their experience with teams? What role did administrators play? Were there notable school-to-school differences in how these teams were organized and managed?

Research Design/Data Collection and Analysis

For this qualitative, comparative case study, we conducted semistructured interviews with 142 teachers, administrators, and other staff in six elementary and middle schools. Interview protocols encouraged participants to discuss their school's approach to teachers’ professional learning and work with colleagues. During school visits, we also observed a wide range of day-to-day practices and collected documents describing school policies and practices. We coded our data with both emic and etic topical codes and used various matrices to analyze responses within and across the sites.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Five schools relied on teams as a central mechanism for school improvement, dedicating substantial blocks of time each week to teachers’ meetings. Teams focused on matters of content (curriculum, lesson plans, and student achievement) and the student cohort (individual progress, group behavior, and organizational culture). Teachers valued their work on teams, saying that it supported their instruction and contributed to their school's success by creating coherence across classrooms and shared responsibility for students. Factors that supported teams included having a worthy purpose in support of the school's mission; sufficient, regular time for meetings; engaged support by administrators; and facilitation by trained teacher-leaders.
Do Organizational Supports for Math Instruction Improve the Quality of Beginning Teachers’ Instruction?
Authors: Smith Thomas M. , Booker Laura Neergaard , Hochberg Eric D. , Desimone Laura M.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Researchers have found that teachers’ effectiveness at increasing student achievement improves during the first few years on the job. Yet little research maps the trajectory of beginning teachers’ instructional quality or investigates what forms of support are associated with variation in this trajectory. Further, although beginning teachers face many challenges not directly related to the rigor of their instruction, such as classroom management, effectively implementing high-quality instruction remains a major challenge.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This article focuses on five research questions: (a) What are the initial levels of beginning seventh- and eighth-grade teachers’ mathematics instructional quality? (b) To what extent are teachers’ preservice qualifications (e.g., major; mathematics knowledge for teaching), prior teaching experience (e.g., weeks of student teaching), and school teaching context (e.g., percent of student receiving free or reduced price lunch) associated with the quality of their instruction during their first semester of teaching? (c) What are the levels of, and changes in, organizational supports for math instruction that these teachers receive during their first three years in the profession? (d) To what extent does the instructional quality of beginning middle school math teachers change over their first three years of teaching? and (e) To what extent do content-focused supports (e.g., math-focused mentoring, math-focused PD, professional community, principal leadership) provided over these three years predict improvement in instructional quality?

Population/Participants/Subjects

Participants include 62 teachers from eight southeastern and three northeastern districts in the United States.

Research Design

Using observation, survey, and interview data, we identify the links between the organizational supports provided beginning teachers and the teachers’ improvements in instructional quality during their first three years of teaching.

Findings/Results

Results suggest little improvement in the instructional quality of mathematics lessons during the first three years of teaching and that most organizational supports, as they are currently delivered, do not appear to help beginning middle school mathematics teachers improve their instructional quality. Using in-depth case studies, we explore the nature of the supports provided and their potential links to teacher improvement.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Our quantitative findings suggest that current methods of supporting beginning middle school mathematics teachers are not robust enough to support the type of teacher improvement demanded by new math standards, although our qualitative analyses suggest ways of designing these supports to better attend to instructional improvement. Our findings also emphasize the critical role the principal can play in connecting new teachers to effective supports.
The Point of No Return? Interest Groups, School Board Elections, and the Sustainment of the Portfolio Management Model in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Authors: Welsh Richard O. , Hall Michelle
Published: November 2021

Context

Given the growing popularity of the portfolio management model (PMM) as a method of improving education, it is important to examine how these market-based reforms are sustained over time and how the politics of sustaining this model have substantial policy implications.

Purpose of Study

The purpose of this article is to examine important patterns and trends in the relationship between campaign contributions to local and state school board elections and the sustainability of the PMM in urban districts. We provide a descriptive analysis of the role of interest groups in education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans and document how the PMM changed the landscape of education politics, with a focus on the actors, both local and national, that sustain the PMM.

Research Design

We describe the creation of Act 35 and the evolution of educational governance changes in New Orleans to determine whether the same interest groups that played a role in the origin of the PMM also contributed to its sustainment. We analyze how these educational governance changes influenced the politics of education reform using data from the Louisiana Ethics Commission on campaign contributions to both state and local school board elections. We apply several non-board and board governance theories to examine interest group behavior. We also conduct interviews with stakeholders throughout the educational system to inform our discussion of the evolution of educational governance and the politics of education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, as well as the categorization of candidates in school board elections.

Results

We find that in the post-Katrina era, there was a diversification of actors in the interest group landscape. These groups influenced educational governance through unprecedented levels of campaign contributions to the state and local school board elections. The influence of interest groups, especially out- of- state actors, contributed to an emerging shift in political control from “traditional” school board candidates to an increase in “pro-reform” board members.

Conclusions

The PMM is accompanied by heightened interest as well as an influx of out-of-state actors in educational policy making and the provision of public education. Unprecedented levels of campaign contributions suggest that state and local school board elections may be one of the primary mechanisms through which interest groups influenced post-Katrina educational governance. Out-of-state campaign contributions were mostly in support of pro-portfolio candidates. There appears to be tangible national support for the PMM that may play a crucial role in sustaining these reforms.
The Origins of Systemic Reform in American Higher Education, 1895–1920
Authors: Ris Ethan W.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The traditional literature on the history of higher education in the United States focuses on linear explanations of the inexorable growth of the size, mission, and importance of colleges and universities. That approach ignores or minimizes a recurrent strain of discontent with the higher education sector, especially from policy elites.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This article examines the century-old origins of a continuing reform impulse in higher education. It identifies the reforms in question as “systemic,” both because they extended beyond the workings of individual colleges and universities and because they had at their heart the dream of systemization, linking and coordinating policy at groupings of institutions at the state, regional, or national level. The narrative focuses on the establishment, operations, and ideology of two early philanthropic foundations designed to spur systemic reform in the higher education sector: the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the General Education Board.

Research Design

This article relies on historical analysis informed by organizational theory.

Data Collection and Analysis

The data for this article come from new archival research, mostly conducted at the Rockefeller Archive Center (Sleepy Hollow, NY), Library of Congress Manuscript Division (Washington, DC), and Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (New York, NY).

Conclusions/Recommendations

This article identifies an ideologically consistent, interlocked cohort of reformers whom the author calls “the academic engineers.” These individuals, associated with elite universities and philanthropic foundations, articulated a vision of higher education reform based on increasing the efficiency and utility of institutions and linking them together in a hierarchical system. The author identifies four key features of this vision and describes the academic engineers’ efforts to enact them. The reformers had some successes but failed to realize their overarching goals; in the article's conclusion, the author examines the historical context and organizational theory as partial explanations for this shortfall.