In this special issue exploring parents' responses to neoliberal policy changes, especially shifting notions of risk and responsibility, this article provides a historical account of local and national policy initiatives in the contemporary United States that have increased risk and placed responsibility for this risk on the shoulders of parents…

Ensuring access and affordability to a postsecondary education for veterans and their dependents has long been a focus of federal and state education policy. Developing policy to support educational attainment among these individuals has required state policymakers to address residency requirements for veterans to determine eligibility for…

As test-based educational accountability has moved to the forefront of national and state education policy, so has the desire for better measures of school performance. No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) status and safe harbor measures have been criticized for being unfair and unreliable, respectively. In response to such criticism, in 2005 the federal…

As part of the "American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009," the U.S. Department of Education sponsored the "Race to the Top" competition to encourage education reforms anchored in improving teacher effectiveness as a driver for improving student-achievement outcomes and closing achievement gaps. The New York State…

Assuming that quality science education plays a role in economic growth within a country, it becomes important to understand how education policy might influence science education teaching and learning. This integrative research review draws on Cooper's methodology (Cooper, 1982; Cooper & Hedges, 2009) to synthesize empirical findings on the…

After more than a decade (and four years behind schedule) Congress finally seems ready to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. For years, critics have complained that the law's focus on test scores offers far too narrow a picture for judging school quality. There is also concern that the "adequate yearly progress," or…

The author analyzes the growth and nature of internal evaluation from the 1960s to the present and suggests that internal evaluation has been on the increase because of its perceived importance. Although the 1960s were characterized by a rich intellectual development of evaluation theory and practice, the fiscal conservatism of the 1980s ushered…

From the 1980s to the present, educational accountability in the United States has grown dramatically. Such accountability in U.S. school districts, although driven primarily by external demands, has internal manifestations as well. The chapter traces the historical development of internal evaluation in American school districts, then highlights…

Almost 30,000 schools in the United States failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in the 2007-2008 school year. For states with comparable data for the 2006-2007 school year, the number of such schools increased by 28%. Half those schools missed their achievement goals for two or more years, putting…

As the national education policy community prepares for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), revamping the school improvement approach leveraged by accountability systems has risen to the top of the agenda. There is an emerging consensus that the school improvement process should be systemic, led by states and…

This case study on the impact of a state takeover in one of South Carolina's most rural school districts ("referred to as the County School District") was completed using a quasi-experimental mixed methods design to examine the impact on academic achievement, school performance, and school leadership as a result of the South Carolina…

In the past 150 years, educational systems have expanded and become integrally linked with economic, political, and social status in modern nation-states. As the stakes for education have risen, so has the call for more and improved use of scientific evidence as a basis for educational policymaking. Evidence from averaged scores on international…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a federal education law that was passed in 2001 with the laudable but challenging goal of closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and improving academic achievement among all students. To that end, NCLB has held states, school districts, and individual schools to impossibly high standards of…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires that schools make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) towards the goal of having 100 percent of their students become proficient by year 2013-14. Through simulation analyses of Maine and Kentucky school performance data collected during the 1990s, this study investigates how feasible…

This executive summary describes a study that finds nearly every school in the Great Lakes states is threatened to fail the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements mandated by the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act. NCLB holds schools and districts accountable for student achievement on state standardized tests and schools…