This study evaluated five teachers from a middle school with a history of low-performances and high teacher turnover. This school participated in a reform program, Pay-For-Performance, where they received financial bonuses to increase performances on literacy and mathematics assessments. Additional requirements included participation in workshops,…

This article presents the results of a mixed-methods study that examined how state policy requiring the use of high-stakes teacher performance assessments (TPAs) affected candidates enrolled in urban teacher preparation programs in the Midwest. The data reveal that despite institutional pass rates above the national average, the edTPA process…

In "Challenging the One Best System," a team of leading education scholars offers a rich comparative analysis of the set of urban education governance reforms collectively known as the "portfolio management model." They investigate the degree to which this model--a system of schools operating under different types of governance…

This article explores how one urban high school under threat of state closure developed a multifaceted literacy program to transform the teaching and learning of literacy in a novel university/school partnership. Analyses of ethnographic and quantitative school data illustrate how the evolution of the literacy program could be understood as a…

Purpose: School district superintendents say politics is the number one factor limiting their performance, yet research provides limited guidance on navigating the political dynamics of district improvement. State takeovers and district-wide turnaround efforts tend to involve particularly heated and polarized debates. Massachusetts' 2012 takeover…

The Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) is among several state-run districts established to turn around underperforming schools. Like other such districts, the ASD removes schools from local control and is not accountable to local political institutions. Despite its authority, the ASD has encountered opposition within Memphis where its…

Educational researchers, leadership, and policymakers have had the privileged voices and place from which to theorize and address educational inequities. But for some exceptions, nondominant families have been relegated to participation in school-centric "parent involvement" activities. Drawing from a participatory design-based research…

This study addressed the problem of job satisfaction of new teachers in large urban school districts. Understanding what contributes to job satisfaction of new teachers has implications for retention strategies supporting cost-effective human capital management as well as for improving working conditions and performance in the educational…

Three teacher-researchers engage in self-study of a college writing program delivered on an urban high school campus. Through examination of their practices, from their particular standpoints bridging secondary and post-secondary education, the teachers find that the writing program repairs opportunity gaps related to the accountability regime,…

Using a learning design perspective on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I examine how accountability policy shaped urban educators' instructional sensemaking. Focusing on the role of policy-rooted classifications, I examine conversations from a middle school mathematics teacher team as a "best case" because they worked diligently to comply…

As the educational community continues to consider the impact of the proliferation of accountability-aimed reform on students, schools, and communities, the consequences of said reforms on teachers must be included. Results of this study indicate that even distant, broad educational policies manifest in specific and profound ways in teachers'…

The field of publicly funded early childhood education continues to evolve into a discipline in which early educators are expected to teach a more culturally and linguistically diverse student population a standardized set of knowledge and skills so that they can meet policymakers' academic achievement requirements. This creates a range of…

Despite the federal government's historical effort to ensure educational equity via policies targeting issues critical to U.S. urban cities, a transformation has taken place in the discourses shaping educational policy solutions. While policies targeting educational equity have not completely vanquished, they have been largely re-written by…

School choice is increasingly the new normal in urban education. But in cities with multiple public school options, how can civic leaders create a choice system that works for all families, whether they choose a charter or district public school? To answer this question, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) researchers surveyed 4,000…

In this paper, we examined data collected as part of a 5-year project designed to foster reform-based urban science teaching through teachers' communities of inquiry. Drawing upon a distributed leadership framework, we analyzed teacher "talk" during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. This analysis yielded five elements:…