Background/Context: This article draws from a larger study focused on how recent immigration policies have influenced school districts across the United States and how educators have responded to support their immigrant-origin students. Scholars have found that immigration policy powerfully shapes the lives of many immigrant youth in multiple…

Background and Context: Statewide test-based accountability in the United States began with minimum competency assessments in public schools during the 1970s, starting in Florida and other Southern states. Controversies over IQ (intelligence quotient) testing contributed to the development of "criterion-referenced" exams that became the…

Background/Context: The administration of student discipline is one of many responsibilities under the purview of teachers and educational leaders across the country. Maintaining a safe environment with minimal disruptions is not an easy task. From existing research on student discipline, we have learned that critical examination of data and…

Background/Context: Underprepared students at community colleges are often assigned to a sequence of developmental education courses that can substantially delay, or even halt, their progress to degree completion. In 2014, Florida implemented a comprehensive reform under Senate Bill (SB) 1720 that allowed the majority of incoming students to…

Background: In the past decade, the laws governing teachers' employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. In June 2014, a California lower court declared the statutes unconstitutional…

Background/Context: Researchers have amassed considerable evidence on the use of student performance data (e.g., benchmark and standardized state tests) to inform educational improvement, but few have examined the use of nonacademic indicators (e.g., indicators of social and emotional well-being) available to educators, and whether the factors…

The Honorable Judge Nathaniel Jones litigated the "Milliken v. Bradley I" case before the U.S. District Court and Supreme Court in 1971 and 1974. Nathaniel Jones was born May 12, 1926 in Youngstown, Ohio, and served as the general counsel for the NAACP from 1969-1979. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Nathaniel Jones to the U.S.…

Background/Context: Research reveals the Head Start program has made impressive gains in increasing the qualifications of its teachers since the passage of the Coats Human Services Reauthorization Act of 1998. These gains have been attributed to the initiatives implemented by the Administration of Children and Families to increase the…

Background/Context: Increasingly, K-12 students are seeking to influence educational policies that directly affect their lives. As student intervention in policy increases, it is important to understand the composition of these groups and how they seek to exercise power and influence over policymakers. Purpose: This study sought to examine how two…

Background: After nearly a century of federal policies focusing on career-related high school coursework, a 2006 policy reauthorization especially called for increased rigor in STEM-themed career and technical education (CTE) courses and increased participation from all students, and particularly women and those with disabilities. We explore…

Background/Context: "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974) ("Milliken I") is a pivotal Supreme Court case that halted a metropolitan school desegregation remedy between Detroit and 53 surrounding suburban school districts. In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, the "Milliken" ruling was a significant retraction from the landmark…

Background/Context: In "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974), the U.S. Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan in Detroit that sought to achieve racial balance in part by busing white suburban students to the city's majority black schools. In a stark departure from "Brown v. Board of Education of…

Context: In the past two years, states have implemented sweeping reforms to their teacher evaluation systems in response to Race to the Top legislation and, more recently, NCLB waivers. With these new systems, policymakers hope to make teacher evaluation both more rigorous and more grounded in specific job performance domains such as teaching…

This article uses empirical data to consider the consequences of particular characteristics of instruction and testing in high school for the modeling and estimation of value-added measures of school or teacher effectiveness. Unlike Mathematics and Reading for most elementary and middle school grades, there is a lack of annual testing of students…

To understand the challenges associated with the enactment of educational policies that aim to improve equity and opportunity for students of color with disabilities, this chapter focuses on two separately conducted ethnographic studies. The first investigates district administrators' approaches to addressing racial disproportionality after the…