Background/Context: Billions of dollars are spent annually on professional development (PD) for educators, yet few randomized controlled trials (RCT) have demonstrated the ultimate impact PD has on student learning. Further, while policymakers and others speak to the role schools should play in developing students' civic awareness, RCTs of PD…

Background: Inspired by various conceptualizations of both cultural diversity and cross-role partnership, this discussion challenges the assumption that holds sway in many people's minds: Differences primarily divide us. The context for this argument is a program that pairs undergraduate students and faculty members in semester-long…

Context: The documentary film about U.S. education reform, "Waiting for 'Superman'," was met with acclaim and controversy when released to theaters in 2010, and again when launching its grassroots "host a screening" campaign in 2011. The campaign ran concurrent with 2011 state legislative sessions, during which…

Background/Context: Little research has directly examined whether principal leadership can increase the degree to which teachers work together regularly in focused ways around content. Prior research has shown that reform efforts seeking to alter the process of teaching can be successful if teachers collaborate to build capacity and improve…

Background/Context: Research indicates that across democratic societies, teachers face numerous intellectual and emotional challenges when handling controversial topics in the classroom. Less attention, however, has been paid to how teachers' willingness to teach controversial topics intersects with political and other societal factors in…

Background/Context: According to demographers, the number of English language learners (ELLs) in U.S schools has been increasing and is likely to continue to increase in coming years. For various reasons relating to language acquisition, cultural adjustment, and persistent discrimination, these students tend to experience academic difficulties.…

Background/Context: Past research has examined many factors that contribute to the black-white achievement gap. While researchers have shown that teacher perceptions of students' academic ability is an important contributing factor to the gap, little research has explored the extent to which teacher perceptions of students' academic…

Background: Over the past decade, most of the quantitative studies on teacher preparation have focused on comparisons between alternative and traditional routes. There has been relatively little quantitative research on specific features of teacher education that might cause certain pathways into teaching to be more effective than others. The vast…

Background/context: In an era of accountability and standardization, elementary social studies is consistently losing its curricular foothold to English/language arts, math, and science instruction. Purpose: This article examines the relationship between elementary teachers' perceptions of instructional autonomy, teaching context, state…

Background/context: Over the past 40 years, the composition of the professoriate has changed substantially across all institutional types. Once predominantly tenure track, now nontenure-track faculty (NTTF) constitute more than 70% of the faculty. While these major changes have occurred, we know little about key stakeholders' views…

Background/Context: Founded in 1974 by James Gray and a group of teacher colleagues who came together as the Bay Area Writing Project in California, the National Writing Project is a professional development network that has spread from one site to 197 university-based sites across the U.S. After such a long period of time in operation, it becomes…

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…

Background: Since the onset of standards-based reform and its continuation in the form of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now Race to the Top, debates have continued about whether such policies foster desirable change in states, districts, schools and classrooms. Research Question: The study asks: How do state and district administrators,…

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…

Background/Context: In-school racial segregation, also called second-generation segregation, is a social dynamic that is manifest in different and complicated ways in schoolhouses across the United States. This study sought to investigate how building-level leadership facilitates or impedes the practice of racial equity in an urban high school,…