The study described in this paper elevates the role of community and educational stakeholders in building purposeful and meaningful relations with school district superintendents in the state of Kentucky. The purpose of this survey-based research is to explore superintendents' experiences with various educational stakeholders including school…

The opt out movement represents a dramatic public challenge to today's school reform agenda, yet little empirical research has examined the political impact of this parent activism on local school communities. To address this gap, this paper uses survey, interview, and document-based data to explore the political impact of opt out activism in four…

Education policies and innovations that aim to improve instructional quality often fail to produce any meaningful or sustained changes to teaching when implemented at scale because of the significant learning demands they place on the individuals, groups, and organizations that comprise an educational system. In this paper, we describe an…

I examine my praxis as a researcher, K-12 teacher, professional development/curriculum writer, and critical scholar as I work with two documents from a large suburban Midwestern school district. The first is the 2009 Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy, which forbade teachers from discussing or teaching about LGBTQ concepts with students. The…

The portfolio management models (PMM) has emerged as an important idea in educational governance over the last decade. In PMM systems, a district or other form of authorizer oversees a collection of independent organizations that operate schools according to their particular philosophy and strategic orientation. Yet underlying the design of PMMs…

I argue that instructional coaches face inherent systemic conflicts when supporting standards-based reform. I interpret the politics of coaching as the local intermediation of broader debates about teacher accountability and teacher professionalism. Drawing on qualitative case study analysis, I examine the effects of macro-level ideological shifts…

As part of an ethnographic study of one rural school-community relationship, this paper explores how school and community leaders conceive of the purpose of schooling in their community, delineates the educational policies and practices that support this purpose, and offers insight into the implications of such a purpose. Adding to the rural…

In education policy and reform circles across the U.S., school turnaround initiatives aimed at improving the lowest performing schools have become a prevalent school improvement approach. However, only a limited number of studies have sought to understand the ways that turnaround strategies are being put into practice in schools. In this case…

Since the Florida State Department of Education promoted lesson study as a stateside teacher professional development model using the Race to the Top funding, school districts across the state have taken various approaches to promote lesson study. However, we do not know yet how district leaders made sense of this new model of teacher professional…

Purpose: Public schools in Washington State have a growing and increasingly diverse English Learner (EL) student population that is subject to the standards and accountability outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). For high school ELs in particular, academic standards and their corresponding assessments, along with the necessary task of…

A shift towards the mainstreaming of ELs presents new complexities for teachers' work with EL populations. This shift presents an opportunity to explore how teachers adapt and learn through teaching in a full-inclusion setting and their everyday interactions with colleagues. This qualitative study explores how high school social studies teachers…

This document reports on the proceedings of a meeting held June 16-17, 2016 in Arlington Virginia to identify key opportunities and challenges around the creation and use of open educational resources (OER). The meeting brought together different groups within the community of education researchers and practitioners to discuss the opportunities…

The purpose of this doctoral research study is to add to our knowledge about principal decision relational networks across a recently consolidated group of school districts in Newfoundland, Canada. By studying principals making district-wide technology policy, we outline the key decision making factors found among rural and urban leaders. We use a…

This study undertook an investigation of policy and practice related to teacher evaluation and development among Colorado school districts. A conceptual analysis was applied to a sample of teacher evaluation policies and process materials from 30 school districts. The study was based on policy objectives stipulated in state statute and best…

The purpose of this study was to identify the issues that most affect Minnesota's rural public school administrators as they attempt to fulfill the mandates required from state legislation and communities. A second purpose was to identify exemplary practices valued by individual Minnesota rural schools and districts. Electronic surveys were sent…