The spotlight that has been focused on ways of measuring and rewarding teacher effectiveness may now be turning to school principals. The Center for American Progress released a report this week on reforming principal compensation, while the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) published guidelines for evaluating effective…

Six years after the passage of No Child Left Behind and midway to the nation's goal of having students on grade level or better in reading and math by 2014, more data than ever before has been collected about the academic performance of American students and schools. Information in this brochure charts student demographics, achievement-to-date and…

A No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 Title II audit found the state of North Carolina out of compliance with the definition of teacher quality for secondary special education teachers. The state specific Praxis exam and the Highly Objective, Uniform State Standard of Evaluation these teachers completed to earn certification to teach subject area…

In this article, the authors discuss the context of urban special education and the complexities of meeting the demands of standards-based reform in urban settings. The study presented highlights the voices of urban special educators in two large urban school districts as they navigate meeting the demands of teaching students with disabilities,…

Lois Weiner (2007) asserts that neoliberalism is "a lethal threat to U.S. teacher education" (p. 274). In this paper, the authors argue that neoliberalism poses the most important challenge faced by teacher education in an increasingly global society. Neoliberalism is having a direct impact on U.S. teacher education in the form of the…

New reports looking at how the teacher-quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are playing out in the nation's classrooms suggest that, while compliance with the 5 1/2-year-old federal law is widespread, problems and inequities persist and, in the end, labeling a teacher "highly qualified" is no guarantee of effectiveness.…

Never before in the history of education has there been more scrutiny of our public schools. With the increased accountability due to the passage of No Child Left Behind legislation and the pressure to perform adequately in international testing, it is imperative that high quality teachers fill the classrooms of America's schools. It is paramount…

School psychology training and practice have been substantially influenced by a series of documents referred to as "Blueprints." The second edition of the "Blueprint" directly led to the development of training standards for school psychology that addressed several domains of practice. Both preceding and simultaneous to the…

With the last reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind or NCLB), special education research exerted a major influence on general education. Even so, the academic outcomes of students with learning disabilities (LD), who are the…

One controversial aspect of No Child Left Behind is the highly qualified provision. The 2001 act required that teachers of core academic subjects be highly qualified by 2006 or school districts would lose federal funding. Virginia districts are still scrambling to hire qualified teachers. Although the federal government has modified the 2006…

This report presents findings about teacher quality from two longitudinal studies, the National Longitudinal Study of "No Child Left Behind" (NLS-"NCLB"), and the Study of State Implementation of Accountability and Teacher Quality Under "No Child Left Behind" (SSI-"NCLB"). The research teams for these two…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandates that every classroom be staffed with a "highly qualified teacher." Research supports that teachers' content knowledge affects student achievement. However, the special education population continues to be taught by teachers who do not have the content area background they teach. In addition,…

This study examines trends in Black student achievement and in the Black-White achievement gap over the period 2000 to 2007, employing data from ten states drawn from the NAEP Grade 8 mathematics assessments. Results are obtained for three levels of aggregation: the state, school poverty stratum within the state, and schools within poverty…

Even the last states to be reviewed on their progress for meeting the "highly qualified" teacher provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act have some distance to travel before satisfying the law, according to Department of Education documents and officials. A case in point is Connecticut, one of the final stops for the federal monitoring…

The National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) is an advocate for having highly qualified physical education teachers deliver developmentally appropriate, standards-based instruction in schools. However, a comprehensive definition of what constitutes a highly qualified physical education teacher did not exist until recently.…