With mounting calls for the justice system to declare literacy a civil right, and with a growing emphasis on accelerating reading achievement at the federal, state, and local levels, educational leaders are under increased pressure to implement practices that will not only increase reading achievement but will prove sustainable for years to come.…

Standardised tests play an important role in early childhood (EC) education in many countries. Although teachers' conceptions largely determine whether and how these instruments are used, research on this topic is scarce. As a result, factors that influence conceptions of standardised testing have remained largely unexplored. To examine teachers'…

Regulatory drivers of teacher quality and teacher professionalism are increasingly being utilised in Australia and internationally to improve children's outcomes. In the context of a recent national review on teacher registration, this article reports on findings from a small-scale study that investigated three early childhood teachers'…

Purpose: This study aimed at describing what occurs at the implementation of accountability in instruction by analysing the perceptions of the teachers who directly encounter and experience this phenomenon in instructional processes. Research Methods: The data were collected using a phenomenology design, which is a type of qualitative research…

Pedagogical documentation within early childhood centres is a key component of pedagogy and teacher accountability. In Singapore, documentation is a requirement specified under legislative policies included in the national Pre-school Accreditation Framework, with parents often perceived as the main audience. This paper reports on a study utilising…

Background & Context: Accurate, reliable, and scalable measurement of classroom quality is critical to ensure that children benefit from early childhood programs. Early childhood classroom quality is most commonly measured using classroom observation tools serving multiple purposes including (1) teacher support (e.g., coaching, professional…

In an era of increased accountability, it is important to understand how exemplary teachers navigate the demands placed on them by their schools, districts, and states in order to support student learning aligned with their beliefs of effective instruction. To understand these negotiations, the authors examined tensions facing exemplary literacy…

In this qualitative study, I followed four urban early childhood teachers through their participation in a teacher education program designed to enhance their linguistically responsive teaching and into the first four months of the new school year. Using the concept of "take-up" presented by Buehler et al. (2009), I identified what the…

The high-stakes accountability policies that stemmed from NCLB and Race to the Top required minimum group sizes in order for school performance to be analyzed through state accountability formulas. Small rural schools have frequently been left out of this equation due to a lack of consistently reportable aggregate groups and subgroups. The…

Kindergarten in the United States has fundamentally changed. It is the new first grade where children are taught increased academic content and experience more standardized testing. There is much debate among education stakeholders about these changes, but such discussions are often siloed-- making it difficult to know whether these changes…

The focus of this study is preschool teachers' perspectives on their experiences during a Pre-K expansion in New York City. The expansion brought on neoliberal approaches to curriculum, child assessment, quality improvement, and instructional support in classrooms, and these changes in turn heightened expectations for accountability. This has…

This article investigates preschool teachers' professionalism and professional strategies in relation to narratives about learning in preschool. These are expressed through the teachers' talk about documentation. A policy on increased systematic documentation in preschools has been introduced in Sweden. Preschool teachers were interviewed about…

Background: Educational scholars emphasize that in order to gain a better understanding of the complexity of teaching, greater attention needs to be paid to teachers' views and perceptions of the challenges and barriers of teaching. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe preschool teachers' views and perceptions of the main challenges…

The purpose of this article is to share the results of a qualitative research study designed to shed light on the perspectives of inclusive prekindergarten classroom teachers in the United States. This study used surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to explore understandings of recently adopted learning standards and accountability…

The field of publicly funded early childhood education continues to evolve into a discipline in which early educators are expected to teach a more culturally and linguistically diverse student population a standardized set of knowledge and skills so that they can meet policymakers' academic achievement requirements. This creates a range of…