Background/Context: Increasingly, instructional reforms in US schools place teachers in differentiated roles, such as literacy coach or data analyst. Not only do these roles hold promise for reforming instruction, but they also may make the teaching career more rewarding by offering teachers new challenges over time. In the past, teachers who held…

An analysis of survey data is used to examine the practices used to hire teachers, the level of principal autonomy within the process, the attributes sought in teachers, and to compare each based upon the characteristics of schools and of principals. Findings indicate that urban and low-performing schools (and the principals of these schools) are…

Outside its heavily-populated south-eastern corner, Queensland is a huge administrative area with many small, remote communities that can be separated by hundreds of kilometres of dirt road, or, in other areas, not accessible by road. In this study, parents, students and teachers in nine schools from rural and regional Queensland were interviewed…

This paper draws on recent work by John Clarke and Janet Newman and their colleagues to analyse a relatively coherent governmental project, spanning the decades of Conservative and New Labour government in England since 1979, that has sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and agencies of the state. Under New Labour this…

This article sheds new light on the so-called "natural tension" between bureaucracy and professionalism in schools. As it is quite common in the educational field to appoint teachers, it is debatable whether the assumed tension really exists. It seems more reasonable to find hierarchical control "within" the professional group.…

In this article, the author reports that within the few decades following the creation of the National Education Association (NEA), a new expression came into use in the English language: "academic freedom." It was in this period that the modern research university first made its appearance in the United States. Before the last third of…

Professional empowerment is vital to nurses' productivity and job satisfaction. A grounded theory study was conducted to describe the basic social process experienced by school nurses in relation to professional empowerment. Interviews with 10 school nurses led to the development of a situation-specific theory of school nurse empowerment,…

What is it like to be a clinical educator? How do clinical educators experience and describe their continuing journey of becoming a clinical educator? Within the model developed in this research, dimensions of being a clinical educator were identified. These dimensions include (a) having a sense of self (and the impact of bringing self into the…

The author reviews four factors that contribute to the reduction of the authority and power of teachers: the Far Right, the Christian Right, the standards movement, and the decline in the use of collective bargaining. As a result of these initiatives, teachers are forced to abandon many progressive educational practices and embrace educational…

The work of individual professors and members of the "faculty" requires a high degree of autonomy. This professional independence that educators enjoy individually through academic freedom and collectively through peer review and shared governance arises from a social contract, a tacit agreement with the public about the contribution of…

This case study explored sociocultural forces that influenced three 10th grade public high school biology teachers' instructional goals, instructional acts, and identity narratives related to the teaching of evolution. Primary data included field observations of classroom instruction and teacher interviews. Secondary data included informal…

Background/Context: In response to state-level test-based accountability and the federal No Child Left Behind Act, school administrators increasingly view centralized curriculum and prescribed instructional strategies as the most direct means of increasing student performance. This movement toward standardization reduces teachers' autonomy and…

In the era of No Child Left Behind, principals are increasingly held accountable for student performance. But are teacher labor agreements giving them enough flexibility to manage effectively? This study answers this question and others. It examines how much flexibility school leaders enjoy on key dimensions of management in America's fifty…

This article inquires into the "calculative practices" that are used to regulate quality in higher education. After providing a historical snapshot of the antecedents of quality regimes, I discuss university ranking systems (league tables) and the UK's Research Assessment Exercise. I ask two questions: first, what do the visibilities of…

From his very earliest days in office, Tony Blair believed that if he was to achieve his broader educational reforms then the teaching profession itself needed modernising--it had to become a "21st century profession". This paper charts the background to this aspiration and the complex range of interrelated policies used to achieve that…