bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Opportunities Lost: Local Translations of Advocacy Policy Conversations
Authors: Ares Nancy , Buendía Edward 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context Policy documents such as Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act [NCLB] (2001) direct schools and school systems to funnel resources to students based on their socioeconomic and linguistic status, as well as according to performance on standardized measures of achievement. Such conversations in the US about serving “at risk” students are powerful influences in schools’ efforts to advocate for the academic and social success of their increasingly diverse student populations. In this sense, advocacy involves organizing curricula, programs, and resources to support the learning and development of students whose academic performance is perceived as threatened. Focus of Study An important question that must be addressed is, “To what degree are school reform initiatives able to articulate a vision of advocacy without lapsing into historical narratives of racial division and individualism, the results of which are continued differential achievement and unequal treatment of students based on socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic markers?” It is equally important to understand how advocacy policies are translated at the school level. The advocacy policy of the reform we examine serves as an example of a vision grounded in an individually focused, colorblind policy, and the translation process as an example of how colorblindness precludes true reform focused on equity. Thus, this work adds to literature in both educational policy and in implementation of reform. Research Design Analyses of policy and enactment of policy in a whole-district school reform effort examined educators’ translation of national and local policy discourses. We pinpoint why the crafting and translation of advocacy policy came out the way it did, and how it could have been different. We connect policy and practice by identifying points of translation where true reform focused on equity might have been undertaken. Conclusions/Recommendations District staff, principals, and teachers first translated the district office's advocacy policy by hybridizing institutional, historical discourses of the individual with discourses of racial difference, and then these same teachers and principals translated their interpretation at the level of their own school setting by hybridizing race-based advocacy with assimilationist ideologies of the purpose of school. We argue for expansion of such individually focused notions of advocacy to capture the fact that students experience schooling differentially based on their membership in social class, ethnic/racial, cultural, and/or linguistic groups. Implications of individually focused, colorblind advocacy policies for the success of this reform in particular and school reform in general are explored.
A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation of Teacher Collaboration for School Improvement and Student Achievement in Public Elementary Schools
Authors: Goddard Yvonne L. , Goddard Roger D. , Tschannen-Moran Megan 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context A review of the literature demonstrates that schools are frequently called upon to improve by developing high levels of teacher collaboration. At the same time, there is a paucity of research investigating the extent to which teachers’ collaborative school improvement practices are related to student achievement. Purpose The purpose of this study was to review the literature and empirically test the relationship between a theoretically driven measure of teacher collaboration for school improvement and student achievement. Setting The data for this study were drawn from students and teachers in a large urban school district located in the midwestern United States. Population The population for this study came from the elementary schools in one large midwestern school district. Survey data were drawn from a sample of 47 elementary schools with 452 teachers and 2,536 fourth-grade students. Research Design Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was the primary analytic method. Survey data were collected approximately 2 months before students took the mandatory state assessments, which provided the scale scores that served as dependent variables in this research. HLM accounted for the nested nature of the data (students nested in schools). This was a naturalistic study that employed secondary data analysis. There was no intervention, treatment, or randomization. Naturally occurring differences in teachers’ levels of collaboration were measured, and statistical controls for school social context were employed. At the student level, the study employed controls for children's social and academic backgrounds. Data Collection and Analysis Data were obtained from teachers and students in the sampled schools. Teacher data were obtained via a survey assessing teacher collaboration. Student data were obtained from the central administrative office of the school district for all students who attended sampled schools during the year in which we surveyed teachers. Results Results of HLM analyses indicate that fourth-grade students have higher achievement in mathematics and reading when they attend schools characterized by higher levels of teacher collaboration for school improvement. Conclusions The authors suggest that the results provide preliminary support for efforts to improve student achievement by providing teachers with opportunities to collaborate on issues related to curriculum, instruction, and professional development. The authors also discuss the need for more research on the effects of different types of collaborative practices using more representative samples.
Making Sense of School Sanctioning Policies in Urban High Schools
Authors: Anagnostopoulos Dorothea , Rutledge Stacey A. 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context School sanctioning policies that allow for external intervention into and closure of low-performing schools have become central components of the current educational accountability movement. Recent studies indicate that these policies compel principals and teachers to alter school and classroom practices in ways that target resources toward efforts to improve schoolwide test scores. Focus of Study The present study extends this research by examining whether and how school sanctioning policies compel principals and teachers in urban high schools to address the failure that students experience in academic courses and on standardized tests. Research Design Using qualitative case study methods, we followed principals and teachers in two urban high schools placed under district sanctions as they sought to make sense of and respond to both their schools’ failure, as measured by standardized test scores, and high rates of academic course failure. The study employs a cultural sociological perspective to trace the explanations of school and course failure that the principals and teachers constructed as they interpreted the sanctioning policy, and to document the extent to which these interpretations became entrenched in school and classroom practices. Findings Analyses of interview and observation data indicate that faculty in both schools enacted numerous changes in response to district sanctions. Whether these changes become institutionalized as part of school or classroom practice depended on the principals’ and teachers’ abilities to mobilize schemas, material resources, and legitimacy. The changes that sanctioning prompted, however, had little impact on faculty efforts to address course failure. Course failure remained bound to a moral causality that located its cause in students’ moral deficiencies and that justified the attenuation of the schools’ responsibility for it. Conclusions The study's findings highlight the limits of school sanctioning policies to improve schooling for students in urban high schools and raise fundamental questions about to whom and for what such policies ultimately hold schools accountable.
Managing Emotions in Teaching: Toward an Understanding of Emotion Displays and Caring as Nonprescribed Role Elements
Authors: Oplatka Izhar 
Published: February 2022

Background Much research has sought to investigate emotions and forms of emotion management among teachers worldwide, including the connection between educational change and teacher emotion; the association between the culture of teaching and teachers’ emotional experience within parent-teacher interactions; the link between teacher emotion and teacher beliefs; and the expressions and sources of a wide variety of emotions in teaching. Purposes Guided by a literature that explored the nonprescribed extrarole activities in noneducation sectors, the current study aimed at understanding the position of emotion management, such as caring, compassion, and emotion displays, in the teacher's role structure. Population A total of 50 teachers participated in this study, of which 40 women and 10 men represent the ratio of women to men teachers in the religiously nonobservant Jewish educational system, the largest one in Israel (66% of the K-12 students). Research Design Open-ended questions were used to gain the respondents’ subjective conceptualizations of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and emotion management in teaching. Additionally, the teachers’ subjective perceptions of the context affecting their OCBs were explored. Conclusions: Teachers’ emotion management is considered to be a discretionary, voluntary-based role element rather than a prescribed one. The teachers’ perspectives of emotion management in their role coincided with the term emotion work, which refers to situations in which employees personally choose to manage their emotions. Implications for teacher education and further research are suggested.
Racialized Space: Framing Latino and Latina Experience in Public Schools
Authors: Barajas Heidi Lasley , Ronnkvist Amy 
Published: February 2022

Background Educational research shows differences in experience, access, and outcomes across racial groups with some groups advantaged and others disadvantaged. One of the concepts used to explain racial differences, racialization, is a taken-for-granted term that is yet to be fully defined in the context of the school. We differentiate the term from racism and show how the organizational space of a school is racialized. Taking a cue from feminist research on gendered organizational space (Acker, 1989; Pierce, 1995) and research on white space (Feagin, 1996; Lipsitz, 1998), we define space as physical space and the implicit and explicit dialogue, processes, and practices that define relationships between structures and agents. Thus, space includes not only physical space but also the meanings and ideologies that mediate the relationship between social structures and agents. Purpose of Study We suggest that school spaces are racialized; that is, taken-for-granted notions of race mediate the relationship between the school and the actors that comprise it. Furthermore, we consider how racialization determines power in these relationships, and ultimately, how that power determines how policy is practiced in a school space. Research Design Our data comes from a qualitative case study focused on evaluating what factors influenced Latino college students’ success. Data was collected over a two year period through a mentor program at a large U.S. research university and includes both fieldwork and interview data. Findings We found that racialization occurred in school organizational spaces that invested in whiteness as a purportedly neutral category. In actuality, relationships and practices often delineated along racialized lines, distinguishing what it means to be white in such a space, and what it means not to be white in that space. Conclusions Conceptualizing school organizational spaces as a racialized white space allows us to examine and understand differences in the school along racial lines outside the limitations of individual prejudice or color-blind approaches—recognizing race is not the problem. The problem is being willing to recognize what we are doing, and then creating relationships that support a socially just educational organization.
Hard of Hearing in Sweden: Educating about and for Pathology
Authors: Stratton Alison 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context This article returns to and expands upon Cremin's and Garfinkel's ideas about education as work—deliberate, systematic, and sustained work—that changes one's consociates, whether planned or not. That is, education must be seen as occurring everywhere, to and by everyone, in many contexts other than in classrooms or schools. Purpose In particular, this article examines the ways in which people are instructed to become Hard of Hearing in Sweden. In Sweden, national and medical policies and practices have made Hard of Hearing people almost, but not quite, inevitable. This study explores how people teach each other about hearing loss, and the responses of those being taught. Research Design Data were collected in 1998-1999 during multi-sited anthropological field-work in Sweden and Denmark, at hearing aid examinations, hospitals, labs, schools, manufacturers’ offices, governmental institutions, research and training conferences, and universities. Research methods included participant observation, interviews, content analysis, and archival research. Findings/Results With the active guidance of the state and medicine, people in Sweden teach each other how to become Hard of Hearing. There are a variety of responses to these lessons, ranging from the compliant patient who goes to appointments and wears a hearing aid to patients who are not at all interested in these lessons and do not “obey their teachers” (e.g., audiologists, doctors, hearing aid manufacturers). Patients who do not conform create problems for the health care field and the Swedish state, undermining the structures of Hard of Hearing created to help people who, quite often, do not want to be helped. Conclusion Hard of Hearing is a social position (re)created by the interactions and interpretations of people, history, and machines, and whole segments of societies are dedicated to its maintenance. It is a transformative, supremely educational arena in which the state, medical institutions, and citizens try to make certain that (1) hearing loss is noticed and people are redefined as satisfactory Swedish Hard of Hearing persons, and (2) all this continues to change as institutions and persons notice each other and new deficiencies. By taking up the moments in the process of becoming Hard of Hearing, this case study exemplifies a broader concept of what can be considered “education.” If we are to fully understand what education is for culture theory and research, the kinds of moments and spaces in which learning takes place must include those historical processes, policies, places, and markets of everyday practice previously ignored.
Regrading the Eighth Grade: Disciplining those who Discipline in a Jesuit Middle School
Authors: Mullooly James 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context This article describes a series of events that brought matters of discipline to the forefront for all concerned at Loyola Middle School, a Catholic Jesuit middle school for disadvantaged Latino boys located in a midwestern city. A narrative of these events will be followed by a brief literature review that illustrates the preponderance of research conducted with a discipline-oriented approach to classroom activity. Research Design This qualitative case study was based on a yearlong ethnographic study and a content analysis of discussions that occurred during weekly faculty meetings. Purpose It will be argued that discipline may not actually deserve the importance it has received. Furthermore, it will be argued that the attention that has thus far focused on discipline has missed essential features of discipline's operation. Highlighting hidden processes of deliberate change involving discipline, the analysis focuses on a secondary tale that begins with actions of teachers that make student behavior horribly visible and then completely invisible. Conclusions The article concludes by linking this analysis to Cremin's definition of education as deliberate efforts to change one's consociates. Extending Garfinkel's classic description of degradation ceremonies, this analysis points out the danger that all participants share in such activities. When degradation ceremonies of individual students become potentially too dangerous for the survival of the school's reputation, it will be shown that deliberate efforts of “succeeding schools” can include “regrading” students.
Exploring Coherence as an Organizational Resource for Carrying Out Reform Initiatives
Authors: Madda Christina L. , Halverson Richard R. , Gomez Louis M. 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context School districts are responsible for helping schools improve learning for students. However, many district initiatives conflict with each other or with existing instructional practices in schools. Recent research on urban school reform points to the value of program coherence in sustaining school change. Our paper addresses an urban district's efforts to design for instructional program coherence in its schools. Purpose This study explores the design process of how one urban school district developed and deployed a series of reports designed to communicate the results of student achievement testing across the district. The focus of this research is to understand the district's efforts to design new programs that would fit coherently into existing initiatives in local schools. We attempt to measure and characterize coherence within the district design team as a means to discern how district leaders can assist local actors in implementation of reform initiatives and foster local program coherence within schools. Research Design This paper presents a qualitative case study of how a district-level nine-member design team built and implemented a reform program to make student performance data reports accessible throughout their district. We used a policy-artifact-based perspective as our methodological framework to access the “program theories” in use by the designers in making the artifact. Our methods allowed us to contrast the differences in the designers’ perspectives on the fit between the designed artifacts and the local school environments. Conclusions The findings from this study revealed how designers developed a stakeholder-based process that helped them come to an agreement on common goals for the design. Their perceptions of the goals, actions, and resources that would drive these initiatives appeared to be aligned, but the actions suggested for local school leaders and teachers varied among designers. This incoherence at the level of design details and artifact implementation would come to threaten the successful implementation of the reform effort at a local level. The results of this work suggest that attention towards coherence throughout the design process can aid district leaders in facilitating instructional program coherence in schools.
Lessons from a Teacher Inquiry Group about Tracking: Perceived Student Choice in Course-Taking and its Implications for Detracking Reform
Authors: Watanabe Maika 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context Given resistance to detracking and the need for strong professional development to support teachers that detracking research documents, it is interesting that little research has focused on teachers’ perspectives in the context of professional development. This study addresses this gap in the literature by closely considering the views of teachers participating in a teacher inquiry group for detracking reform. Purpose of the Study Six teachers at an urban public high school that historically disavowed tracking met monthly to discuss issues of ability, intelligence, and tracking in response to the challenge set forth by Oakes, Wells, Jones and Datnow (1997) to address deeply rooted notions of ability and intelligence for detracking reform. This article presents case studies of three of the six teacher participants, whose conceptions of tracking provide insight into some of the complex notions of tracking operating at the practitioner level in schools. Research Design Data sources for this qualitative case study primarily constituted field-notes from eleven teacher inquiry group meetings and two interviews with each of the six teacher participants. Conclusions/Recommendations The perspectives of teachers about tracking and detracking in the context of professional development reveal that there is disagreement in the practitioner community on how much tracking exists and what it looks like, even among teachers teaching at the same school. While teachers clearly articulated and exposed the constraints on student choice in course-taking, teachers frequently called on choice as a rationale for why tracking no longer existed. The emerging variation in these teachers’ conceptions of tracking parallels discourse over the shifts in the scope and complexity of tracking in the research community, and has important implications for the pursuit of detracking reform. Among the specific recommendations the author presents for researchers and practitioners are the following: 1) Teachers and researchers need to unpack their definitions of tracking, 2) Teachers and researchers need to give student choice in course-taking more attention, 3) Teacher inquiry groups need to examine professional community literature, and 4) Teachers need structural support for this form of professional development.
Information Literacy in the Laptop Classroom
Authors: Warschauer Mark 
Published: February 2022

Background/Context Technological and economic changes have put a high premium on developing students’ information literacy and research skills. Previous attempts to deploy educational technology toward these ends have proved disappointing because K–12 teachers have difficulty integrating shared computers into instruction. In response, numerous schools and districts have piloted one-to-one programs, in which each student has access to a laptop computer connected wirelessly to the Internet throughout the school day. Purpose/Objective This paper analyzes the information literacy and research practice in a purposely stratified selection of 10 one-to-one laptop K–12 schools in California and Maine. Research Design/Data Collection and Analysis Sources of data in this multisite case study include observations, interviews, surveys, and teacher- and student-produced materials. Findings/Results The study found that students in all the laptop schools learned to access information, manage it, and incorporate in into their written and multimedia products. However, the focus on evaluating information, understanding the social issues surrounding it, and analyzing it for the purpose of knowledge production varied widely across schools. Some schools succeeded in promoting scholarly approaches to working with information, whereas other schools mostly limited themselves to teaching procedural functions of computer and Internet use. Examples of these differences are given through a comparison of three diverse schools in Maine. Conclusions/Recommendations The study concludes that one-to-one wireless laptops offer important affordances for promoting information literacy and research skills but that socioeconomic context, visions, values, and beliefs all play a critical role in shaping how laptop programs are implemented and what benefits are thus achieved.