Background or Context: Amid a backdrop of increasing deprofessionalization of teaching and teacher education, education researchers and reformers continue to highlight the complexity and expertise of these professions. Expertise-as-process (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993) is a conception of expertise that eschews the traditional focus on…

Gender disparity at the leadership level of large (defined by the National Association of Independent Schools [NAIS] as > 700 students) K-12 independent schools is a critical and persistent issue in the ongoing effort to foster equity and justice in historically white and male-led independent schools in the United States. The number of women…

Background or Context: During the first months of the COVID pandemic, teachers were forced to move to online instruction without the appropriate resources. They resorted to social media to gather expertise and ideas. This study is grounded in an analysis of the questions posed by K-12 teachers on popular Facebook groups. Purpose, Objective,…

Background/Context: This study contributes to our growing understanding of coaches' role in district reform by introducing instructional-coach teams as a potentially important concept for understanding coaching activities that support systemic reform. Prior research shows that instructional coaches leverage their position between the district…

Background: Traditional mathematics logics lead to inequities that reproduce narratives such as the myths of racialized and gendered hierarchies of mathematical ability (Hottinger, 2016; Martin, 2009). Black girls sit at the bottom of both racialized and gendered hierarchies; however, research over the past decade has provided evidence that Black…

Background/Context: As prior research has established, historical thinking is shaped by disciplinary-specific reading and writing. Yet while our understanding of historical reading is relatively strong, our understanding of historical writing--and particularly, the core processes at work in historical writing--is less robust. Purpose: This…

Background/Context: Most research on "elite" schools has focused on the private sector. However, as a result of economic residential segregation, a number of public school districts exist which may plausibly be construed as socioeconomically elite. Districts of this sort remain relatively understudied. In particular, few researchers have…

Background/Context: Teachers' relationships with principals, instructional coaches, and other teachers have important implications for the improvement of their instructional practice and student learning. In particular, teachers who access content-specific instructional expertise through their social networks are more likely to exhibit and sustain…

Background: Despite increasing popularity and mounting evidence for teacher collaboration as a lever for school improvement, reported changes in teaching associated with collaboration are often subtle and incremental, rarely involving substantial shifts in instructional practice called for by advocates of deeper learning and next-generation…

Background: Amid calls for increased data use, there is little research or policy guidance for how to build schools' capacity to leverage data to improve teaching and learning. Building on previous research highlighting the social nature of data use, we contend that in order to understand how capacity develops, research must focus on relationships…

Background/Context:Federal policy, as codified in Race to the Top (RTT) funding guidelines, outlines four types of intervention: turnaround, restart, closure, and transformation. RTT has embraced a technocratic paradigm for school reform that frames choice less as the opportunity for the public to deliberate about what it wants from its schools…

Background/Context: Validity issues are often discussed in technical terms, but the context changes when measures enter broad public debate, and a wider range of interests come into play. Purpose: This article, part of a special section of TCR, considers the political dimensions of validity questions as raised by a keynote address and panel…

Background: Education reforms over the last several decades have relied heavily on external assistance to help schools increase capacity for improving outcomes, but investing in sustained outside coaching and support is increasingly difficult with diminishing federal, state, and district resources. One under-investigated possibility for…

Background/Context: Which ideas should be included in the K-12 curriculum, how they are learned, and how they should be taught have been debated for decades in multiple subjects. In this article, we offer mathematics as a case in point of how new standards-related policies may offer an opportunity for reassessment and clarification of such…

Background/Context: Prior research on "Milliken v. Bradley" focuses on the failure of this case to implement interdistrict busing in the highly segregated Detroit schools. Much of this work focuses explicitly on desegregation, rather than on equity and addressing individual, systemic, institutional, and organizational challenges that may…