This qualitative study investigated the teacher evaluation systems currently in place in diocesan high schools in California and the ways in which those systems could be improved. Diocesan schools are private, Catholic institutions that do not subscribe to federal regulations when creating their evaluation instruments. Measuring effective teaching…

Currently, the perceived use of critical theoretical frameworks to shape instruction in public K-12 education is undergoing intense scrutiny in popular and political debate. Chief among such frameworks has been Critical Race Theory (CRT), which, at the time of this writing, has been legally banned or restricted in eighteen states -- with similar…

Background or Context: Federal and state reforms have expanded accountability systems for school districts, schools, and teachers. However, there is little evidence that the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems relying on measures of student learning and measures of teaching practice, with differentiated performance categories and…

The practice of grading students began in the late 1800s and became institutionalized within the educational system. Grading in K-12 education has remained relatively unchanged in its purpose, intent, and use for nearly a century while simultaneously becoming an increasingly critical factor that impacts student opportunities, external perceptions…

The field of education in America--oft-viewed as a catalyst for change and self-improvement--has a racist history, which is often undiscussed by teachers and likely unknown to students. This article guides high school students to explore how educational texts, tasks, and policies have been products and producers of racist ideas in the past and…

The lack of formal grading policies within individual schools and school districts results in differential grading across classrooms. In many secondary schools, an individual course may be taught by multiple teachers. This study aimed to determine if the existence of differential grading results in disparate outcomes for students based on their…

Starting in the 2016/17 academic year, high school students in Norway who missed more than 10 percent of the hours in a given course without a medical excuse could not receive a final grade. We examine the impacts of this policy on student absenteeism, the incidence of the no grade penalty and two measures of student achievement. The policy had…

The utility of teacher evaluation depends on meaningful teacher engagement with evaluation processes. However, critics of traditional tenure policies suggest that tenure nullifies teacher engagement with practices to improve performance. This study investigates whether tenured teachers exhibit perceptions that reflect disengagement with evaluation…

Accountability policies through standardized testing are widespread in diverse educational systems. Based on an ethnographic research study, we sought to understand how a learning assessment policy, used for over three decades in primary and lower secondary education, is lived and interpreted in daily school life in Chile. This article analyzes…

The purpose of this study is to determine if teachers perceive evaluation as providing the motivation and feedback to change classroom practices in a context where teacher evaluation carries varied stakes for tenured versus untenured teachers. This mixed methods case study of four high schools in a single district in North Carolina uses survey and…

Most states claim academic rigor and career readiness as goals for all their students. But as school systems continue tracking students into higher or lower levels of academic coursework and into career and technical courses that lack rigorous, real-world assignments, they reflect an apparent underlying belief that their students' abilities are…

In 2015, Wisconsin began mandating the ACT college entrance exam and the WorkKeys career readiness assessment. With population-level data and several quasi-experimental designs, we assess how this policy affected college attendance. We estimate a positive policy effect for middle/high-income students, no effect for low-income students, and greater…

Notwithstanding the introduction of education multilingual policies worldwide, testing and assessment procedures still rely almost exclusively on the monolingual construct. This paper describes a study, part of a larger project fostering a new multilingual education policy in Israeli schools, exploring bi/multilingual assessment. It included two…

This research aims to determine the level of policy implementation on teaching observation in Darasamutr School, Thailand. It likewise explored the factors affecting such level of implementation. Three population samples were considered for the study, namely elementary teachers, high school teachers and administrators. Perceptions among these…

Special education in the public-school setting is designed to support students with disabilities by providing them specially designed instruction to meet their unique needs. This cannot be achieved without special education teachers who undergo specialized training to enable students with a disability to reach their maximum potential. Special…