This research study examined how school leaders internalize new state-level reading policy aligned with the body of research known as the Science of Reading and how they make sense of district expectations to make decisions for their school community and its impact on students at-risk for reading difficulty. The Ready to Read Act is a Maryland…

Purpose: This study explored principals' leadership actions from three leadership frameworks, instructional, socio-cultural and cultural-psychological, to understand how each contributes to influencing teachers' work and learning opportunities for Hispanic English learners. Design/methodology/approach: The research was conducted as a case study,…

Principals' beliefs and actions have powerful outcomes in the lives of the students and families they serve. In this article, we offer the portrait of a long-standing principal of a diverse urban school where the student body is 90% Latinx, 65% English learners (ELs), and 87% eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. We explore many key practices…

A phenomenological case study by Counsell (2007) explored and investigated the phenomenon of what happened as Florida's A+ Plan intersected with the life histories of one beginning African American female third grade teacher and one veteran White female third grade teacher at demographically different school communities in one Florida school…

The purpose of this case study was to demonstrate the influence of Tier 1 of Response to Intervention and Instruction (RtI[superscript 2]) and instructional coaching on teachers' instruction and on students' and English Language Learners' (ELL) learning. Research was conducted in one large urban elementary school. The unit of study…

Accountability in education has prompted policy makers and practitioners to focus on data use for instructional and organizational decision-making. The popular media have seized on Value Added (VA) measures as a key type of data use for reforming U.S. schools. Among education researchers, however, there are both critics and proponents. We examined…

Scholarship on parent-principal relationships often ignores how some parental involvement can create challenges for school leaders. We analyze parent-principal relationships at an urban public K-8 school over a 30-year period, exploring how three different principals "managed" parental involvement. Our analysis reveals how these…

Background/Context: This article addresses which school-level factors contribute to school quality. Previous research has focused on assessing the effects of school-level variables on student-level quality (e.g., achievement). However, the field has been limited in not evaluating the effects of school-level factors directly on measured…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the implementation of a Response to Intervention framework had a positive impact on student reading achievement in urban elementary schools. This was a causal-comparative study that examined the reading performance of a sample of kindergarten through grade three students who experienced the Response to…

The authors conducted a quasi-experimental investigation of effects on achievement by grade-level teams focused on improving learning. For 2 years (Phase 1), principals-only training was provided. During the final 3 years (Phase 2), school-based training was provided for principals and teacher leaders on stabilizing team settings and using…

In this article, the author relates an incident at the elementary school in Maryland where she was teaching 3rd grade at the time. After the author finally managed to get her students to read--and enjoy it--the principal insisted they watch TV instead. Odd as the accusation was, it was made even odder by the fact that her students were reading…