Early childhood and elementary education emerged from a variety of knowledge and research bases. Tensions emerged as they were brought together in a unified public kindergarten through 12th-grade educational system. This review describes how standards and accountability policies have exacerbated tensions between early childhood and elementary…

This article examines the impact of a statutory assessment in England, the Phonics Screening Check (PSC), on classroom practices of grouping children by 'ability.' Bearing in mind the argument that assessment is the rudder that steers the otherwise slow-moving battleship of educational practice, it is argued that the PSC has altered how teachers…

In the USA, the dominant narrative surrounding the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination in American public education centres on the rhetoric of steady progress towards equality. While the nationalistic-based dominant discourse maintains that progress towards a desegregated, multicultural American school system steeped in equality and mutual…

This paper synthesizes recent research on formative assessment to elucidate its core components, then examines some new approaches currently being tried in schools. It considers the evidence for them, as well as the questions and issues they continue to raise, and takes a look at the challenges schools and school systems face in implementing both…

The present study examined the Daily Report Card (DRC) intervention in high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The DRC is a commonly employed behavioral intervention for treating children with disruptive and off-task behaviors in schools. To implement a DRC, teachers and parents work collaboratively to create an…

Federally mandated standardized testing (i.e., in core subject areas and certain grade levels), as an element of educational accountability, began in 2002 with the No Child Left Behind Act. With that step, large-scale assessments came to serve as one of the foundations of accountability-based systems and policies not only for districts, schools…

Differentiated instruction is a nice idea, but what happens when it comes to assessing and grading students? What's both fair and leads to real student learning? An internationally recognized expert on grading practices, Rick Wormeli first examined these questions 10 years ago in the first edition of "Fair Isn't Always Equal." In this…

The alignment of professional development and teacher evaluation has been a growing concern in teacher professional development practices. The issue of how teacher evaluation can help authentic professional development is important in that teachers only learn what is real, useful and valuable to them. Based on our reflections on current…

This article explores the associations between student performance and the presence of state policies that include student achievement in teacher evaluations. We examined performance among states from 2007 through 2013. Including student performance in state teacher evaluation policies is modestly associated with higher reading achievement but had…

This article draws upon recent theorising of the "becoming topological" of space--specifically, how new social spaces are constituted through relations rather than physical locations--to explore how standardised data, and specifically test data, have influenced teachers' work and learning. We outline the varied ways in which teacher…

This study provides an overview and a snapshot of new student orientation (NSO) and new student e-orientation (NSEO) programs, with a focus on the content and feature analysis of the NSEOs. It offers an overview of currently available NSO programs of 100 randomly selected community colleges from a master list of nearly 900 community colleges in…

Academic researchers who seek to publish their work are confronted daily with a barrage of e-mails from aggressive marketing campaigns that solicit them to publish their research with a specialized, often newly launched, journal. Known as predatory journals, they often promise high editorial and publishing standards, yet their exploitive business…

The continuation of neo-liberalism requires concerted effort. Political consent is constructed through practices of enforced cultural socialisation, the mobilisations of which obfuscate other realities. David Harvey describes this process as the construction of consent. The common sense encouraged by English academy schools is the result of the…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been criticized for encouraging schools to neglect students whose performance exceeds the proficiency threshold or lies so far below it that there is no reasonable prospect of closing the gap during the current year. We examine this hypothesis using longitudinal data from 2002-03 through 2005-06. Our…

Organizational actorhood is a term that has gained prominence in literature about higher education as a way to describe some of the key global change processes with emphasis on organizational accountability, formalization of structure, focus on goal definition and managerialism. At the same time, there is less knowledge about how organizational…