This article is the third of three on "Sources of Authority in Education." All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of education reform in the US and the business-influenced Global Education Reform Movement. The other two are "Negating Amy Gutmann:…

This brief is part of a four-part series examining the past, present, and future of modern school accountability systems. With the dual forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national call to action on racial inequity, the question of how we should measure and hold schools accountable for the impact they have on students is more urgent than ever.…

The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US and other countries, with a specific focus on the macro-level policy contexts of improvement research in education. In the US, earlier analyses examined these policy contexts from a…

Never before has more been asked of State Education Agencies (SEAs), commonly known as state departments of education. In recent years, policymakers at the state and federal level have viewed the SEA as the default entity for implementing new and sweeping K-12 initiatives--everything from Race to the Top grants and SEA waivers to teacher…

This paper analyses how high-stakes, standardised testing became the policy tool in the U.S. that it is today and discusses its role in advancing an ideology of meritocracy that fundamentally masks structural inequalities related to race and economic class. This paper first traces the early history of high-stakes testing within the U.S. context,…

This article examines the federal role in adolescent literacy from its roots in Lyndon B. Johnson's administration with the Economic Opportunity Act (1964) through the Reading for Understanding grants of 2010. The authors consider the extent to which the recent attention to and changes in the federal approach to adolescent literacy can be…

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…

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…

Political insider Christopher Cross has updated his critically acclaimed book to reflect recent education policy developments, including the impact of the Obama administration and "Race to the Top" as well as the controversy over NCLB's reauthorization. Featuring a new introduction and the addition of postscripts for key chapters, this…

Assuming that quality science education plays a role in economic growth within a country, it becomes important to understand how education policy might influence science education teaching and learning. This integrative research review draws on Cooper's methodology (Cooper, 1982; Cooper & Hedges, 2009) to synthesize empirical findings on the…

The educational achievement and attainment of young people in the United States has been a long-standing issue of concern. While analyses of long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that students in the United States have made gains in reading and mathematics over the past few decades, a sizeable…