bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Exploring Differences in the Distribution of Teacher Qualifications Across Mexico and South Korea: Evidence from the Teaching and Learning International Survey
Authors: Luschei Thomas F. , Chudgar Amita , Rew W. Joshua 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Although substantial evidence from the United States indicates that more qualified teachers are disproportionately concentrated among academically and economically advantaged children, little cross-national research has examined the distribution of teacher qualifications across schools and students. As a result, we know little about how different institutional contexts, policies, and priorities influence children's access to qualified teachers. Research Question Our research questions are: (1) Are the qualifications of lower-secondary teachers within and across Mexico and South Korea distributed uniformly across schools? (2) If not, does the distribution of teacher qualifications in each country favor less or more advantaged children? (3) How can dissimilarities in teacher-related policies and educational priorities help to explain differences in the distribution of teacher qualifications across Mexico and South Korea? Research Design We employ secondary analysis of data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey, which was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2007/2008. We use these data to describe the distribution of various teacher qualifications across communities of different sizes and across schools with varying levels of parental education. We also explore cross-national differences in institutional priorities and teacher-related policies. We compare Mexico and South Korea because while these two countries are similar in the level of teacher hiring and assignment, they are quite different in terms of their general commitment to educational equity. Findings/Results We find that the distribution of qualified teachers in South Korea is skewed toward disadvantaged children, while Mexican teachers tend to be distributed in a way that favors more advantaged students. Specifically, in South Korea students living in rural areas and those in schools with lower average parental education have greater access to better educated and more experienced teachers. The opposite occurs in Mexico. Conclusions/Recommendations We argue that these differences are due to both explicit policies and a greater commitment to educational equity in South Korea, relative to Mexico. Moreover, these differences are likely to be related to large cross-national differences in educational performance and equity.
Reading in the Crawl Space: A Study of an Urban School's Literacy-Focused Community of Practice
Authors: Francois Chantal 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context The pressure to understand “what works” to advance adolescents’ reading development has increased as the Common Core State Standards’ call for youth to grapple with a range of complex texts. While we have learned more about promising reading programs and interventions for adolescent students in schools, few programs have had a demonstrable impact on middle and high school students’ reading achievement. As a result, categorical reading underperformance among youth persists in schools nationwide and is worse in urban schools. Instead of examining the effects of a reading program in isolation, we may need to turn our attention to understand how those programs are lived and enacted within the contexts of their school cultures. Purpose and Research Questions This study depicts one urban school's efforts to support its middle and high school students in reading. Two research questions guided this study: 1. What are the current practices designed to provide a sociocultural context conducive to growth in reading skills at Grant Street Secondary School? 2. How do various organizational members (i.e., students and staff) perceive and experience these practices at Grant Street Secondary School? Though a range of factors influenced students’ reading at the school, this paper provides an in-depth portrayal of another instructional component — independent reading — that emerged in my analysis as vital to the way students and staff oriented themselves around literacy. Research Design Because the theoretical frame for this study assumes that literacy is social and situated, my research design reflected an effort to describe interactions related to reading, the domains where reading activity circulated, and perceptions of those interactions. As such, I drew upon three sources of qualitative data: interviews from staff and students, ethnographic observational data, and documents. These three sources of qualitative data enabled me to describe the literacy activities at the school and locate them in the larger school organizational and cultural processes. Conclusions and Recommendations This study suggests that students may benefit from daily, sustained time for independent reading time that is instructional. This study also suggests that coordinated efforts across school staff may ensure youth's positive interactions with texts. This study also holds implications for school-based research focused on disciplinary literacy. Ultimately, this research reconceptualizes our understanding of effective instructional practices for adolescents, emphasizing a multidimensional approach that highlights the role of reading as a social activity.
The Penetration of Technocratic Logic into the Educational Field: Rationalizing Schooling from the Progressives to the Present
Authors: Mehta Jal 
Published: November 2021

Context No Child Left Behind is only the most recent manifestation of a longstanding American impulse to reform schools through accountability systems created from afar. While research has explored the causes and consequences of No Child Left Behind, this study puts the modern accountability movement in longer historical perspective, seeking to identify broader underlying patterns that shape this approach to reform. Purpose and Research Design The study explores the question of the short and longer-term causes of the movement to “rationalize” schools by comparing three major movements demanding accountability in American education across the 20th century: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era; the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control. Findings This impulse to rationalize schools cannot be explained by interest group or partisan explanations since the reformers defy easy ideological categorization.. Instead, the reforms can be understood as a penetration of “technocratic logic” into the educational sphere. In each movement, this process exhibited a similar pattern: (1) the identification of a crisis of quality which destabilized the existing educational status quo; (2) the elevation of a technocratic logic, backed by the knowledge base of a high-high status epistemic community; (3) the rallying of ideologically diverse powerful actors external to the schools behind a commensurating logic that promised control over and improvement of an unwieldy school system; and (4) the inability of education to resist this technocratic logic (and often to be co-opted by it) due to teaching's historical institutionalization as a feminized, weak, bureau-cratically-administered field lacking its own set of widely respected countervailing professional standards. Conclusions/Implications This history suggests that unless teachers are able to develop and organize a stronger field, they will remain at the whim of external actors. It also suggests that top-down accountability-centered approaches are limited if the goal is to consistently produce teaching that can help students engage in higher level academic work. Rather than continuing to pursue these rationalizing strategies, this analysis and emerging international evidence suggest that a more promising approach would be to work towards professionalizing the educational field.
Quantifying the Consequences of Missing School: Linking School Nurses to Student Absences to Standardized Achievement
Authors: Gottfried Michael A. 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Parents, policymakers, and researchers uphold that missing school has negative implications on schooling success, particularly for students in urban schools. However, it has thus far been an empirical challenge within educational research to estimate the true effect that absences have on achievement outcomes. This study addresses this issue by applying multiple quasi-experimental methods and, subsequently, contributes a more accurate understanding of the pervasive, negative effects of missing school. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of the Study The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of individual-level absences on individual-level standardized testing achievement (reading and math) in an urban school district. Population/Participants/Subjects The dataset compiled for this study is multilevel and longitudinal and is comprised of five elementary school cohorts within the School District of Philadelphia, for a total of N=20,932 student observations over three academic years. Individual student records were linked to teacher, classroom, and school administrative data as well as to census residential-block neighborhood information. Research Design This study combines secondary data analyses and quasi-experimental methods. This study begins with a baseline, linear model of achievement, where the dependent variables are Stanford Achievement Test Ninth Edition (SAT9) reading and math scores. To address issues pertaining to omitted variable bias, this study employs three methods: fixed effects, value-added, and instrumental variable models. Findings Consistently across all methods employed in this study, the results indicate a potentially causal, detrimental negative effect of absences on both reading and math standardized achievement. The effects remain significant even after accounting for additional student, neighborhood, teacher, classroom, and school factors. Conclusions/Recommendations This study demonstrates that after accounting for omitted variable bias in multiple capacities, the negative relationship between absences and achievement is even more detrimental than reported in previous research. With a more detailed and realistic prediction of the negative ramifications of missing school, it now becomes possible to develop data-driven educational policy.
Teaching to and Beyond the Test: The Influence of Mandated Accountability Testing in One Social Studies Teacher's Classroom
Authors: Neumann Jacob W. 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context The nature of the impact of state-mandated accountability testing on teachers’ classroom practices remains contested. While many researchers argue that teachers change their teaching in response to mandated testing, others contend that the nature and degree of the impact of testing on teaching remains unclear. The research on the relationship between testing and teaching in social studies follows this pattern. For example, some researchers argue that mandated testing fosters a “just the facts, ma'am” approach to teaching social studies. Others, however, contend that factors such as teachers’ personal beliefs about social studies and about what learners need to know are equally, if not more, determinative influences on teaching as are testing pressures. Focus of Study This article presents an extended and fine-grained analysis of the influence of state-mandated accountability testing on one social studies teacher's classroom practice. Research Design Grounded in the narrative inquiry tradition, this case study spans approximately two and a half years of fieldwork, including approximately 110 days of observations of one eighth-grade U.S. history classroom. Conclusions The findings from this study shed light on the problems and frustrations that one teacher faces when confronted with a testing apparatus that limits her instructional time with students and an accountability exam that emphasizes a “bare bones” approach to content. While no generalizable conclusions are intended to be drawn from this study, the data presented in this article nonetheless add support to the viewpoint that while state-mandated accountability testing does influence classroom teaching, teachers’ beliefs about subject matter and their goals for students play an equal, if not larger, role in shaping their classroom practices.
How to Make Innovations Practical
Authors: Janssen Fred , Westbroek Hanna , Doyle Walter , Van Driel Jan 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context A fundamental tension has long existed between school reform proposals and actual teaching practice. Despite a large literature on teacher change, the discontinuity between innovation and practice continues and many attempts to reform teaching fail to be enacted in most classrooms. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The purpose of this paper is to present a bridging methodology for connecting pedagogical innovations to the practical demands of teaching. The methodology is framed within practicality theory, which is an ecologically grounded analysis of the design issues and constraints that practitioners face in the everyday work of teaching. To conduct lessons, teachers must construct procedures (instrumentality) that fit circumstances (congruence) within available time and resources (cost). Underlying these practicality dimensions is a set of reasoning processes that can be understood from the perspective of three strands of research on bounded rationality—goal systems, heuristics, and evolutionary planning. Intervention/Program/Practice The analysis of teacher practical reasoning provides a design foundation for a bridging methodology consisting of (a) construction of a heuristic goal system (HGS) representation of the hierarchy of goals and heuristic means that underlie a teacher's planning decisions with respect to lesson segments used to carry out instruction; and (b) a teaching impact analysis (TIA) that connects an innovation's lesson structure to a teacher's heuristic goal system and shows how a teacher can adapt his/her current practice to achieve increased expected value (i.e., an improvement). Research Design This study was designed as an analytical essay that theorizes teaching practice, teacher reasoning, and a bridging methodology for connecting teaching practice with specific educational innovations. Cases of an experienced biology teacher and of 11 student teachers are presented that demonstrate the nature of this bridging methodology and variations in its use in particular circumstances. Conclusions/Recommendations The bridging framework provides a practical tool for identifying the action-guiding model of a teacher, the connection of this model to the precise components of an innovation, and the recombination or adaptations a teacher can make to achieve personal goals through an innovation. Although further studies are needed, this framework promises to furnish a powerful tool for making innovations practical. We cannot characterise behaviour independently of intentions, and we cannot characterise intentions independently of the settings which make those intentions intelligible both to agents themselves and to others (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 192).
Mandated Engagement: The Impact of Early College High Schools
Authors: Edmunds Julie A. , Willse John , Arshavsky Nina , Dallas Andrew 
Published: November 2021

Background Early college high schools, small schools that blur the line between high school and college, have been obtaining very strong results. This paper uses the frame of student engagement to posit an explanation for the success of these schools. Purpose This paper examines the impact of early college high schools on indicators and facilitators of engagement in the ninth-grade. The paper also looks at how early college students perceive these facilitators of engagement. Participants The main sample for this study includes students who applied to an early college high school and went through a lottery process. Student who were accepted through the lottery are the treatment students and those who were not accepted form the control group. Intervention Early colleges are small schools, often located on college campuses, that aim to provide a rigorous course of study with the goal of ensuring that all students graduate with a high school diploma and two years of university transfer credit or an associate's degree. Serving students in Grades 9-12 (or 13), the schools are targeted at students who typically are under-represented in college. Data Collection and Analysis The study uses administrative data submitted to the North Carolina Department of Instruction, including suspensions and attendance data. The study team also administered an original survey to treatment and control students that included scales on indicators and facilitators of engagement. Both the administrative and survey data were analyzed using multiple regression. Finally, the study team collected qualitative data from interviews with early college students. Results Early college students had better attendance, lower suspensions, and higher levels of engagement than control students. Compared to the control students, early college students also reported higher levels of all of the facilitators of engagement examined, including better relationships with teachers, more rigorous and relevant instruction, more academic and affective support, and higher expectations. Conclusions Students in early colleges experienced overall higher levels of engagement on a variety of dimensions. The qualitative data suggest that early colleges make concerted and purposeful efforts to engage students in school. These efforts seem to almost require that students are active participants in school; in other words, early colleges can be seen as essentially “mandating engagement.”
“Integration was a Solution, but Integration does not Address Quality Education”: A Conversation about School Desegregation with Dr. Michael A. Middleton
Authors: Diem Sarah , Brooks Jeffrey S. 
Published: November 2021

Dr. Michael A. Middleton is Deputy Chancellor of the University of Missouri–Columbia. He is an expert in civil rights and employment discrimination and served as lead counsel for plaintiffs in the St. Louis metropolitan school desegregation litigation. Dr. Middleton previously served as director of the St. Louis District Office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He was also an associate general counsel at the EEOC in Washington, DC for three years. During this time, he managed the commission's national litigation program and supervised 250 attorneys at 22 district offices in federal court litigation activities. He has held several other high-level government positions, including deputy assistant secretary of education at the U.S. Department of Education; director of the Office of Systemic Programs at the EEOC; and assistant deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As deputy chief counsel and director of the Government Employment Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in the early 1970s, Middleton handled civil rights litigation focusing on voting rights and government employment throughout the South. He began his career as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where he actively litigated several major employment discrimination cases in the federal courts across the country. On February 15, 2013, we sat down with Dr. Middleton to discuss the history, current status, and future of school desegregation.
Non-Tenure-Track Faculty's Social Construction of a Supportive Work Environment
Authors: Kezar Adrianna 
Published: November 2021

Background The number of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF), including both full-time (FT) and part-time (PT) positions, has risen to two-thirds of faculty positions across the academy. To date, most of the studies of NTTF have relied on secondary data or large-scale surveys. Few qualitative studies exist that examine the experience, working conditions, and worklife of NTTF. The study is framed by the theory advanced by Berger and Luckmann that reality is socially constructed and the broader sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism described by Blumer, Denzin, and Stryker. Purpose This study fills this gap in our current understanding by using qualitative methods to understand a fundamental issue that has not been examined and is critical to NTTF success and performance—how they perceive and experience support or lack of support within their work environments, particularly their departments. Participants I identified three four-year public institutions that are Master 1 according to the Carnegie Classification scheme. In total, I interviewed 107 NTTF, comprised of 58 PT and 49 FT, across the three institutions in 25 departments (14 unsupportive and 11 supportive). Research Design The study employed a multicase study approach using typical case sampling. The overall study examined departments that had made changes in policies and practices to support NTTF, compared to those that had not made changes, in order to investigate the impact on faculty performance and perspective. I conducted one-to-one interviews with NTTF as the main source of data collection. Findings The main findings of the study are that individual life conditions, such as career stage, and organizational features, such as the history of the department, shape the way NTTF construct support at any given time, and that this process of constructing support is dynamic and changing over a career. Conclusions The study suggests the importance of Shaker's hypothesized set of conditions that shape the perspective of NTTF. The study findings suggest that to understand the complex, multifaceted beliefs around support that are shaped by varying individual and institutional conditions, chairs might meet with the entire NTT faculty once a year in an open forum to discuss support or to anonymously survey all the faculty. NTTF leaders also need to be more aware of these differences in perceptions of support so they might better respond to needs.