Drawing upon the growing datafication of contemporary schooling, our purpose in this article is to use topological thinking as an analytical device to better understand the professionals and practices within emergent data infrastructures. We address this by attending to an influential national (and subnational) data infrastructure of school…

Education reform legislation has led to an upwelling of mandatory teacher evaluation for all elementary, middle school, and high school educators, including those who teach special education. While this reform effort aimed to improve overall teacher effectiveness and student learning outcomes, the teacher evaluation for special education is a…

Two significant metaphors in the education discourse describing student and teacher roles in academic achievement are Student-as-Product, and Student-as-Consumer. These fail to take into account the importance of students' active engagement in their own learning. Current policy initiatives around education reform reflect these deficits as well.…

Background/Context: Blended learning--a learning model in which online learning is combined with faceto- face instruction to provide a more personalized learning experience for students--has shown enormous growth in recent years. Though many policymakers and educators are optimistic about the potential of blended learning to provide the type of…

This essay is a critical humanist discussion of curriculum; a departure from the technicist view of education [education meant to support a global capitalist economy] and an analysis of curriculum considering critical humanism, political economy and critical race theory among other modes of critical analysis and inquiry. Our discussion supports a…

The purpose of this comparative case study was to explore the ways educators at the school level experience the Common Core Standards and examine the contextual factors that impacted the way it was initially implemented. Qualitative data were gathered through teacher surveys, faculty focus groups, and interviews with each school principal and the…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT) are part of a widely heralded and visible change effort, providing a powerful force--replete with evidence, logic, money, and voice--that is changing public schooling away from locally run and state-subsidized, into a federal-state-controlled enterprise. The article begins by situating the…

Background & Purpose: This article focuses on the current educational reform movement in New York State resulting from the state's receipt of $700 million in Race to the Top (RTTT) money. Specifically, the article will focus on one aspect of the RTTT requirement, which requires that school districts develop teacher accountability systems that…

Tennessee was one of the first states to win Race to the Top funds in 2010, partly based on new state policy which tied student achievement measures to teacher and principal evaluations. Nearly half of state legislatures in the United States have passed similar legislation in the past two years. This article examines recent state legislative…

As the nation's economy continues its irrevocable shift from manufacturing toward idea-driven, creative industries, our schools--and the teaching and learning enterprise at the heart of our schools--need to undergo a transformation as well. The result of such a transformation needs to be a type of educational experience and expertise that will not…