Federal policies intended to promote educational equity, especially through state accountability mechanisms, have mobilized efforts to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Although these efforts have met with some success, achievement gaps remain. The authors argue that local cultures of teaching practices and decision making continue…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has changed the face of education in America. Now that the law is coming up for renewal, it is time to deal with the problems and inequities it has created. In this article, the author discusses the two factors at work that NCLB has failed to address: the student and the parent. She also discusses how art can help in…

By reducing class size we will close the achievement gap in public school education, caused by prior neglect especially since the civil rights era of the sixties. Additional, highly qualified and specialized teachers will more effectively manage a smaller class size and serve more individual student needs in the crucial early grades, where a solid…

Although it is assumed that student cognition contributes to student performance on achievement tests, it may be that current testing models lack the degree of specification necessary to warrant such inferences. With test score interpretations as the referent, the authors in this special issue address the role of student cognition in learning and…