In response to the global pressure that has led to an increased emphasis on international comparisons of student achievement since the 1980s, multiple federal reforms aimed at producing greater consistency in curricula have been initiated in the United States. The purpose of this study was to examine the feasibility of a national curriculum and…

Parent and community involvement has always been a part of the public education system; from its inception in the early American colonies, local community control was a hallmark of schools. Today, with mandates present in the No Child Left Behind Act, the Race to the Top legislation, and amidst more pressing international comparisons, educators…

Kindergarten has become increasingly academically oriented, and U.S. kindergarten teachers are increasingly called upon to implement policies that require assessment and promote accountability. However, little recent research has focused on kindergarten teachers' beliefs about kindergarten readiness. The authors examined teachers' beliefs related…

Solid, well-grounded teachers can be instrumental in solving the problems facing our schools and students because it is successful teachers who are the most valuable, in-school contributors to our students' success. The importance of teacher preparation programs (TPPs) in developing quality teachers has been reinforced by researchers who have…

This article examines the re-professionalization of teaching across a transformative decade of market-based and standards-based reforms in the U.S.A. The first section works with the sociological concept of the 'new professionalism' to situate the No Child Left Behind act, Race to the Top, and CAEP accreditation within a broader movement to align…

This article contributes to the literature on school turnaround by examining the effect of the North Carolina Transformation (NCT) initiative, which was implemented in 75 low-performing schools after the state's efforts to turn around the lowest performing schools under Race to the Top ended, on student reading score growth in grades K-3. Reading…

When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became law in 2002, it was viewed as an effort to create uniform standards for students and schools across the country. More than a decade later, we know surprisingly little about how states actually implemented NCLB and the extent to which state implementation decisions managed to undo the centralizing objectives…

For middle schools to fully achieve their goals, it is important for them to be staffed with teachers who understand the unique developmental needs of young adolescents and are specifically prepared to meet those needs. Middle school leaders have long been advocates of specialized teacher preparation and licensure; however, the current terrain of…

Like the depiction of plagues in apocalyptic science fiction, neoliberalism continues to infect education at all levels. This infection causes educators to care not for the children, but to embrace the figure of the Child. Reproductive futurism, in the imagined redemptive figure of the Child has been regulating the structure of education not for…

Over the last two decades, federal and state policy makers have launched a number of ambitious, large-scale education reform initiatives--No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, and others--only to see them sputter and fail. In 2017, the authors convened a number of leading scholars to explore why those initiatives…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) changed federal teacher policy in a number of important ways. This article uses No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Race to the Top, NCLB waivers, and ESSA to detail these shifts. Since ESSA is in the early phase of implementation, we analyze the policy through the lens of previous empirical work as a way of…

Drawing upon the growing datafication of contemporary schooling, our purpose in this article is to use topological thinking as an analytical device to better understand the professionals and practices within emergent data infrastructures. We address this by attending to an influential national (and subnational) data infrastructure of school…

In their study of the educational ecosystems that surround schools, the authors recognized a growing global trend that has positioned "intermediary organizations," and particularly non-system intermediary organizations, or those not involved in the formal governmental education system, in an oversized ecosystem role. Through their direct…

The UIC Center for Urban Education Leadership conducted a study in collaboration with the Qatar Foundation. As the research and work on educational ecosystems has grown, we now recognize a growing global trend that has positioned "intermediary organizations" in an oversized ecosystem role. Through their direct work with schools,…

Panel or grouped data are often used to allow for unobserved individual heterogeneity in econometric models via fixed effects. In this paper, we discuss identification of a panel data model in which the unobserved heterogeneity both enters additively and interacts with treatment variables. We present identification and estimation methods for…