This qualitative case study examines how board members make sense of federal accountability policies and how their sensemaking shapes their use of assessment data as a policy instrument. Deviating from previous work on practitioner sensemaking, the participants' interpretations of assessments did not align with their ensuing use of the data.…

Teacher shortages in special education have been a source of long-standing concern for professionals and parents involved in the education of students with disabilities. Because of their geographic location, culture, and lack of resources, rural administrators have always struggled to staff their schools with qualified special education teachers.…

In this commentary, we revisit "NCLB and the Demand for Highly Qualified Teachers: Challenges and Solutions for Rural Schools," an article we published in this journal in 2005. We consider the predictions we made then about the impact of the Highly Qualified Teacher mandate on special education teacher (SET) shortages in rural states and…

The purpose of this study was to inform the upcoming and overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by exploring whether rural school districts face disadvantages as they attempt to follow the law's provisions and, if so, if the law's rural-specific section ameliorates these disadvantages. The research drew upon…

On December 10, 2015 President Obama signed the "Every Student Succeeds Act," Public Law 114-95, which will take effect in the fall of 2016 and which replaces No Child Left Behind (NCLB)--the name for the nation's suite of K-12 education laws in effect from 2001 to 2016. There are many similarities between NCLB and ESSA. For example,…

This qualitative study of educators' understandings of resilience contributes to ongoing rural school research that examines educators' beliefs about, and attitudes toward, rural students whom are at-risk and factors that impact rural school success. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers and administrators in one rural Florida…

Advocates of rural education emphasize the need to examine supports which may promote rural educators given the challenging contexts of which they face. Teacher visioning has been conceptualized as a navigational tool to help sustain and promote teachers given high-challenging contexts. The current study explored 10 public school teachers from…

Special education teachers, through a national survey conducted in 55 rural districts, provided information on the positive and negative aspects of teaching in rural schools. The 203 special educators were asked what they liked best about their position and what they found challenging. Some of the themes identified in the analysis centered on…

This article examines the influence of the No Child Left Behind Act on the decision making of rural principals and teachers about curriculum and instruction as well as the possible long-term effects on rural education. Data were gathered from 101 rural elementary school principals in Missouri and 76 rural elementary school teachers in Maine.…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been proclaimed by some as a reform that will improve education for students from all backgrounds, in all locations. The main components of NCLB, however, are biased against students in small and rural schools. This bias, called "placism," discriminates against people based on where they live. This rural…

Accountability and assessment are critical components to the success of schools today. As leaders of school districts, superintendents in Texas and across the nation are faced daily with meeting this challenge. While doing so, they must remember that their priority commitment is not to testing programs, but to helping children achieve.…

Rural education scholars may be biased advocates of small schools or they may accept the values of the scientific community. An analysis of a rural Pennsylvania district's failure to receive Reading First funding did not provide enough information to determine why the proposal was rejected. The article's arguments about "privatization"…

Adequate yearly progress (AYP) on No Child Left Behind criteria was examined for a randomly selected sample of districts that qualify for the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP). The sample involved 10% of districts that were eligible for the Small Rural Schools Achievement (SRSA) program and 10% that were eligible for the Rural and…