The ranking of the United States in major international tests such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is used as the driving force and rationale for the current educational reforms in the United…

The National Coalition on School Diversity has updated this review of federal support for school integration during the tenures of Secretaries Arne Duncan and John King, who both served during the Obama Administration. While much remains to be done, the Obama Administration has made concrete progress on school integration policy. This overview…

The coupling of literacy and race emphasizes their historic and contemporaneous intersection in literacy research. In this article, I draw on my scholarship and use three counternarratives to articulate how literacy and race significantly influence access, equity, and freedom. First, I examine access within the sociohistoric context of African…

A consensus is emerging about how school leaders affect school performance, and how important principals are to improved student learning. Yet the national reform policies--No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (RTT)--incorporate assumptions about school and district leadership that are very much at odds with this research. NCLB and RTT call…

Ask Antonio White what he thinks of Race to the Top--President Barack Obama's signature K-12 initiative--and the Florida teacher will tell you the competitive-grant program is a "difficult pill to swallow." Merit pay for teachers based partly on student test scores is "a joke," he says. He's also not a fan of expanding charter…

Tennessee has undertaken several wide-ranging reforms aimed at educator practice and effectiveness over the past several years, including the launch of a new teacher evaluation system, modification of teacher tenure policy, and initial implementation of Common Core State Standards. This report from the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE)…

Over the last almost two decades, high-stakes testing has become increasingly central to New York's schools. In the 1990s, the State Department of Education began requiring that secondary students pass five standardized exams to graduate. In 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act required students in grades three through eight to take math and…

The evidence is clear: better teachers improve student outcomes, ranging from test scores to college attendance rates to career earnings. Federal policy has begun to catch up with these findings in its recent shift from an effort to ensure that all teachers have traditional credentials to policies intended to incentivize states to evaluate and…

In the United States, as public demands for quality teachers have escalated, there has been a corresponding increase in national policy efforts to tie the standards of student success to teacher preparation, licensing, and evaluation. This conceptual paper examines how national authorities used specific policy tools to usurp the state's…

California's implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and its governing state role in one of the Race to the Top comprehensive academic assessment consortia, present a major opportunity to dig deeply into the challenges of fair and accurate assessment of the academic performance of its English Learners (ELs). Moreover, recent…

The Obama administration's Race to the Top competitive grant program initiated an unprecedented wave of state teacher-evaluation reform across the country. To date, most of the scholarly analysis of this activity has focused on the design of the evaluation instruments or the implementation of the new evaluations by districts and schools. But…

In 2009, the Obama Administration created a $4.3 billion dollar grant competition for states called "Race to the Top" (RttT). The money, earmarked from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was to be distributed by the Department of Education to states who were making efforts to adhere to precirculated reforms supported by…

While there are many factors critical to improving America's primary and secondary schools, strengthening teacher education is an essential part of any strategy likely to make a difference. When the Obama administration created the Race to the Top or RTT Fund--"to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education…

A prominent and sustained White House push for renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is viewed as crucial to prospects for the 9-year-old law's reauthorization by a now-divided Congress. The law's current version, the No Child Left Behind Act, was President George W. Bush's signature domestic achievement when it was passed…

On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The law had a very simple mission: kick-start an economic recovery through strategic investment. Deep within the law were a number of key education initiatives, including Race to the Top (RTT), which was a way to invest in the nation's education system…