Federal policies intended to promote educational equity, especially through state accountability mechanisms, have mobilized efforts to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Although these efforts have met with some success, achievement gaps remain. The authors argue that local cultures of teaching practices and decision making continue…

Purpose: Many studies have investigated the impact of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and its sanctions on students and teachers. Little research, however, has systematically examined the relationship between NCLB and its sanctions and school principals. Given the importance of school leadership and the accountability systems implemented at…

Education reform legislation has led to an upwelling of mandatory teacher evaluation for all elementary, middle school, and high school educators, including those who teach special education. While this reform effort aimed to improve overall teacher effectiveness and student learning outcomes, the teacher evaluation for special education is a…

Over the years the amount of homework and what kind of homework students are completing on a nightly basis has changed dramatically. From the early 1900s when homework was abolished because it was considered a violation of child labor laws to today when after No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002, the focus has moved to evaluating academic…

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between teachers' perception of their work, their intent to leave their current position, and their realized turnover at the height of the federal accountability policy era in the United States. The study uses a framework of teacher de-professionalization and demoralization operationalized…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) assumes that state-mandated tests provide useful information to school administrators and teachers. However, interviews with administrators and teachers suggest that Minnesota's tests, which are representative of the current generation of state-mandated tests, fail to provide useful information to administrators…

Public schools stress the need for students to become informed and engaged citizens, however social studies instruction is becoming marginalized in many elementary schools today, the very area where they learn citizenship and about the world around them. This study seeks to: understand the reason for the loss of instructional time for social…

The media suggest that accountability pressure increases teacher stress and drives teachers away from teaching, resulting in teachers leaving disadvantaged schools that serve larger proportions of poor and minority students. However, no prior work has systematically examined the changes in the national trends of teacher turnover in response to No…

In today's era of high stakes testing and accountability, school principals are confronted with many difficult challenges in addition to those traditionally experienced by principals given the advent of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the many mandates each school principal must report on annually. With mandated curriculum standards and widespread…

The pressure is on. For the first time in the nation's history, schools are being required to produce measurable evidence that all students are learning, and they are being asked to do so amidst fiscal crises at the state and local levels. While several legitimate criticisms have been made about No Child Left Behind and its unfunded mandates, few…

This article discusses Mississippi's use of a reform model that helped dozens of schools that had failed to induce academic progress under the No Child Left Behind Act. In a forgotten corner of Mississippi's state capital, test scores are going up at a middle school for struggling students. The progress of students at risk of dropping out at the…

High-stakes testing has created challenges for teachers, administrators, parents, students, and other related education stakeholders in recent decades (Nichols & Berliner, 2007). While high-stakes tests have a long history (Ravitch, 2009) it was not until No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002 that the tests became law for most…

This article presents findings about the implementation of a system for rapidly assessing student progress in math and reading in grades K-12--a system that potentially could reduce pressure on teachers resulting from high-stakes testing and the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act. Interviews with 49 teachers and administrators in one…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 provides guidelines that all public schools in the United States must follow. Provisions of this law require that specific assessments be given to all students in schools across the United States and that individual states establish one system of accountability for all schools. Although much is being done,…

This article illustrates how the transformation of a classroom into an interactive museum devoted to historical inquiry, not only satisfies the need to meet history standards, but more importantly, results in rich and rewarding learning opportunities for students. Here, the authors present three purposes of writing this article, and these are: (1)…