Special Education and Teaching Commons^™

There Are No Winners Here: Teacher Thinking And Student Underachievement In The 6th Grade, Sue L. Pettit

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The following ethnographic study was conducted with 6^th grade teachers in a middle school that has been stigmatized by the public as a failing school and cited by the government as a School in Need of Assistance according to the No Child Left Behind Act. The purpose of the study was to examine what teachers believe about persistent underachievement in order to shed light on whether teacher beliefs inform teachers' efforts to ameliorate underachievement. As my study progressed, my research data suggested that teachers use a faulty testing curriculum that guarantees poor student performance and only serves to confirm …