Background: Educational reform responds to local and national pressures to improve educational outcomes, and reform efforts cycle as similar pressures recur. Currently, reform efforts focus on teachers, even though confidence in a host of American social institutions is dropping. One of the most widespread reforms regarding teachers is the…

This article summarizes major points about the transformation of educational assessment that emerged from the work of Gordon Commission and it presents recommendations to different stakeholders as to needed changes in policy, practice, and research and development.

We conclude this special issue reflecting back on the history of desegregation and questioning how we move forward in trying to achieve racially integrated school settings. The epilogue includes a conversation with Dr. Michael A. Middleton, Deputy Chancellor of the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Middleton is an expert in civil rights and…

The articles in this special issue examine the increasingly complex relationship between segregation, desegregation, and integration in a sociopolitical environment vastly different from that of the initial days of desegregation. These issues are examined from historical and political perspectives, contextualizing the complexities of segregation,…

In this commentary, we discuss the lessons we learned from case studies of two African American mathematics teachers, thereby endorsing the claim made by the contributors to this special issue that the insights they gained are not restricted to mathematics teaching in nonselective urban schools but can also inform the field more generally. We then…

In this article, Edward Zigler, interviewed by Barbara Beatty, talks about a turning point in the history of Head Start that reveals how policy choices, bureaucracy, and science came together when he was told to phase out the program in 1970. New to Washington, Zigler learned that President Richard M. Nixon's domestic policy advisor Daniel Patrick…

This commentary frames the importance of the topic of this special issue by highlighting the changes that have occurred in school systems around data use, particularly in large urban districts, and the need for a more rigorous evidence base. Collectively, the articles in this volume provide a jumping-off point for such a research agenda around…

Background/Context: This essay is a part of a special issue that emerges from a year-long faculty seminar at Teachers College, Columbia University. The seminar's purpose has been to examine in fresh terms the nexus of globalization, education, and citizenship. Participants come from diverse fields of research and practice, among them art…

Background/Context: This essay is a part of a special issue that emerges from a year-long faculty seminar at Teachers College, Columbia University. The seminar's purpose has been to examine in fresh terms the nexus of globalization, education, and citizenship. Participants come from diverse fields of research and practice, among them art…

The author explores how each author contributes to our understanding of the social context--self-regulation link. She also describes how the articles collectively enhance our insights into the social embeddedness of regulation strategies in the classroom and lists some of the challenges that remain.

Background/Context: The issue of how to achieve a racially diverse student population has become increasingly challenging since a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court split decision endorsed the importance of creating diverse schools, while simultaneously limiting the assignment to public schools based on an individual student's race or ethnicity. The article…

This article introduces the special issue, which focuses on the ways in which educational institutions in Europe and North America are responding to the growing number of children of immigrants entering schools and universities. It discusses the ways in which the needs of children of immigrants differ from those of native-born students, and the…

This article provides an overview of a set of articles in this special issue that synthesize current research and provide future directions for research, both conceptually and methodologically, on gender, socioeconomic, and language-minority differences in college transitions, as well as a review of college transitions research in the discipline…

In this article, teacher action research is positioned as a bridge connecting research, practice, and policy--as an important and practical way to engage teachers as consumers of research, as researchers of their own practice, as designers of their own professional development, and as informants to scholars and policy-makers regarding critical…

Using the "story constellations" version of narrative inquiry, I tell of two schools--Cochrane Academy and Hardy Academy--that evolved from a shared social narrative history and that were given stories of school and stories of reform that had many features in common. I detail how the founding principals' narratives informed the teachers' knowledge…