This article describes a project in which researchers at VSA arts, an international nonprofit organization, attempted to determine the value of embedded arts education (sometimes called "arts integration") for students with disabilities. As part of the mandate of VSA arts to encourage the use of the arts in teaching students with…

Education researcher Gerald Bracey claims that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) will result in privatization and educational vouchers because schools are expected to show regular gains in the proportion of students judged "proficient." (MLF)

The purpose of this study was to increase the comfort level of teachers toward inclusion of students with learning, behavioral, and physical disabilities in general-education classrooms for one high school. Participants included 3 focus groups of teachers with 2 groups consisting of 6 teachers and 1 group consisting of 7 teachers. One…

Finding improved ways to train education researchers has taken on new urgency as federal legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 call for "scientifically based research in education." The authors of this article suggest an approach to socializing doctoral students to a common…

This research is a follow up to a similar study published by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania in 2003 in which researchers examined alternative education policies and practices among Pennsylvania school districts. The current study extended the previous research to include information on the perceptions of administrators and teachers on the…

The Science Summit reinforced a question upon which many of us in science education are focused: How can we, the science education community of researchers, practitioners, and consumers, lead policy? We include a brief review of the No Child Left Behind Act and its implications for teachers, and elaborate about one ongoing and growing effort to…

In early 2003, two distinguished researchers in school law analyzed aspects of the law vis-a-vis vouchers and tax credits and the public schools (McCarthy, 2003; Welner, 2003). The issues were confusing, and the author wondered how educators and the public responded. How can policy makers make reasonable decisions about public education without a…

President Bush says that the No Child Left Behind Act is working, pointing to student-achievement results from a single subsection of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and tentative Reading First data. But the evidence available to support his claim is questionable. The data Mr. Bush cited are from just the "long-term…

In 2002, the RAND Corporation launched a project to understand how educators are responding to the new accountability requirements in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania--three states that represent a range of approaches, regions, and student populations. The researchers aimed to identify the factors that enhance the implementation of SBA…

Value-added models, which rate schools for effectiveness while taking into account the poverty and other socioeconomic status of the students, are generating increased interest. This paper describes the use of one such model to evaluate whether school ratings changed when three new programs were introduced: the "Target Teach" curriculum…

This article explains the apparent failure to communicate between science education researchers, policy makers, and staff at state and district offices of education. Each group is a stakeholder in K-12 education. Policy makers specify courses of action to meet the needs of an educational system, state and district staff work to implement these…

The "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 crystallized the concern for accountability in education. National testing was mandated as a way to improve the "broken" educational system. Publicly funded early education programs were not spared from such testing. While the positive effects of high-quality early education on children's…