Education Commons^™

Introduction: Classroom Life In The Age Of Accountability, Gail M. Boldt, Paula M. Salvio, Peter Taubman

Occasional Paper Series

"For this Occasional Paper, we invited teachers to respond to the ways in which proliferation of standards and testing combined with their own loss of professional control is altering the landscape of American education....Our goal is to raise questions about whether and how educators are balancing the demands of high stakes testing, scripted curricula, and a focus on performance outcomes with the emotional complexity of classroom life."--The editors

Bridging Policy And Education: How Elementary Students Are Impacted By Reform Efforts, Kristen E. Bunn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on how state policies that encourage school reform impact student experience. The paper demonstrates what students in these reformed schools experience and what lessons we can learn from their experiences. In particular, the research focuses on engagement levels and the matching of intentions to student propensities. A goal of the paper is to help bridge the policy and educational worlds by shedding light on what is happening in four school-of-choice classrooms.

A mixed methodology is used; data from an Educational Connoisseurship and Criticism, an engagement measure, and interviews are triangulated. The research was conducted at two school-of-choice …

High School Transformation: The Lived Experience Of Teachers Moving To Small Learning Environments, Reginald Lawrence

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Author's abstract: Educators faced with a decline in student achievement and increases in dropout rates are seeking ways to provide the best possible educational environment for students (Oxley, 2005). High school transformation, also known as the small schools movement, is a reform that is gaining currency in the world of education (Meier, 2006). Alien (2001) observed that high school transformation is the process of altering the makeup of a large comprehensive high school, also known as a traditional high school, into small high schools or small learning communities at the same location. The teacher is the most important component of …