Explore the vast range of titles available.

Policy statements of the last two decades have directed schools to enter into partnerships with parents to enhance the social, emotional, and academic growth of their children. However, in practice and scholarship, parental involvement has been constructed as attendance to school-based activities and needs. This article draws on data from an instrumental case study to explore how and why five single working mothers become involved in their children’s education outside of school. Findings suggest the participants’ efforts were responses to compensate for a school curriculum that they perceived to be deficient in ways that are detrimental to their children’s overall social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development as fully educated human beings. The reconceptualization of parental involvement that emerges from this study also provides a glimpse into what parents value as important to the education of their children, ultimately having implications and significance for the creation and implementation of educational policy.

Effective school districts maintain superintendent and school board collegiality which can foster success and connectedness among members. Delagardelle and Alsbury (2008) found that superintendents and board members are not consistent in their perceptions about the work the board does, and Glass (2007) found that states do not require boards to undergo evaluation for effectiveness. In the current study, 115 board meetings were observed using the School Board Video Project (SBVP) survey, which was created in 2012 by researchers to uncover school board meetings’ effectiveness. MANOVA, Univariate ANOVA, and Pearson Chi-Square test results revealed significant differences between low-, medium-, and high-performing districts’ school board meetings. Evidence indicated that low-performing districts’ board meetings were: less orderly; had less time spent on student achievement; lacked respectful and attentive engagement across speakers; had board meeting members who seemed to advance their own agenda; had less effective working relationships among the governance team; had fewer board members who relied on the superintendent for advice and input; had one member, other than the board president, stand out for taking excessive time during meetings; and did not focus on policy items as much as high- and medium-performing school districts. The research concluded that more school board members from low-performing districts needed training to improve their effectiveness. Furthermore, highly refined and target-enhanced school board training programs might lead to lasting governance success and more effective teaming that could improve district, and ultimately, student achievement.

Congress's role in defining and promoting equality of educational opportunity has evolved over the past 55 years since Brown v. Board of Education. Most recently, all three branches of the federal government have focused more on equality of educational opportunity for individual students rather than for protected classes. In this article, the authors combine two different frameworks to assess Congress's evolving role in ensuring equality of educational opportunity for all students-particularly given the new political and economic realities facing the nation. The first is federalism; the second is policy instruments for advancing varied goals in education, which the authors use to examine specific policy domains where Congress might increase its impact on equality of educational opportunity. These domains are concerned with \"incentivizing equity\" through competitive grants designed to reduce racial and socioeconomic inequality, improving existing categorical grant programs to make them more targeted and efficient, and strengthening enforcement of existing policies and programs. Throughout, the authors consider how recent research about equality of best be brought to bear on congressional priorities. In conclusion, they discuss the political realities facing Congress in 2012 and beyond, including partisanship and the prospect of cuts to pre-K-12 education spending.

Policy can be a useful tool for effecting change, but policy analysis, which shapes policy development, has been underused in music education research. This paper demonstrates how Bardach's (2000) Eightfold Path can be used to develop solutions to problems in music education. Some have argued that school music programs do not prepare students to engage musically in today's society. To develop alternative solutions and project their outcomes, I analyze several current and past efforts to redefine music education and secure its place in the curriculum. Several alternatives, which include revising the National Standards, developing a national curriculum, improving professional development, and reconceiving advocacy, are evaluated, and policy recommendations are made that will enable the profession to redefine music education to better serve today's students.

The present study investigated 90 elementary teachers' ability to identify two systematic error patterns in subtraction and then prescribe an instructional focus. Presented with two sets of 20 completed subtraction problems comprised of basic facts, computation, and word problems representative of two students' math performance, participants were asked to examine each incorrect subtraction problem and describe the errors. Participants were subsequently asked which type of error they would address first during math instruction to correct students' misconceptions. An analysis of the data indicated teachers were able to describe specific error patterns. However, they did not base their instructional focus on the error patterns identified, and more than half of the teachers chose to address basic subtraction facts first during instruction regardless of error type. Limitations of the study and implications for practice are discussed.

In 1994, Congress reauthorized Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and passed the Goals 2000: Education America Act. Together, these two laws were supposed to support the development and implementation of standards‐based, systemic reform initiatives in the states. Despite these high hopes, Goals 2000 and Title I faced a number of problems after they were passed, particularly in regard to the implementation of their accountability provisions. Similar problems appear to be surfacing in the course of the implementation of No Child Left Behind, the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Accordingly, this article examines the political and implementation problems of the 1994 statutes and the relationship between these problems.

The call for American students to meet world-class standards in the federal Goals 2000: Education America Act (1994) and No Child Left Behind legislation, as well as state standards and accountability legislation, has been explicitly inclusive: All students must be held to these high standards. Litigation offers the potential to leverage standards-based accountability laws in ways that refocus attention on opportunities to learn. Moreover, the lens of systemic, classroom-based litigation offers new insights into how evidence can be conceived in ways to advance equity-minded challenges to current policies. In this article, the author examines some fundamental policy issues through a legal lens. The author emphasizes that there are substantial barriers standing in the way of the litigation explored in this article. (Contains 2 figures and 16 notes.)

This book presents a feminist pedagogy of multiculturalism developed from Paulo Freire's theories on the politics of literacy. Freire has argued that literacy is the precondition for not only forms of social and political agency, but also social transformation and emancipation. In his view, teachers and students must refuse to be either experts or simply learners. Teachers must learn how to listen to their students, be self-reflective, and allow students the opportunity to speak with responsibility for their own actions but without fear. Students need an environment in which they are willing to take chances and can learn to use and legitimate their own experiences without fear of ridicule. Developing successful multicultural educational environments requires respect for the diversity of students' experience. America 2000 and Goals 2000 are examined to provide an exemplary model of the dominant discourse on educational reform and to employ elements of a critical theory and feminist cultural criticism in order to reveal its view of literacy as a discourse implicated in the construction of a particular form of citizenry. The book is organized into the following chapters: (1) Critical Literacy as a Pedagogy of Empowerment; (2) Rethinking Literacy and Pedagogy; (3) The Politics of Difference; (4) A New Generation of American Schools; and (5) A Feminist Pedagogy of Multiculturalism. (JLS)

With the passage of Goals 2000, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the Education Science Reform Act of 2002, Congress has put a priority on a science curriculum for children that is based on research on the best practices in science education. According to the U.S. Department of Education, teachers \"need to know what programs and strategies are effective in improving achievement in... science.\" Students' achievement scores for scientific literacy are far below international standards and are not adequate for \"full participation as productive citizens in the 21st Century\". However, there is a lack of research-based science education practices for students with visual impairments and a great need for valid research that will improve the possibilities for these students in the area of science education. In this article, the authors discuss the implications of this issue on students who are visually impaired. They contend that research should be in response not just to the mandates of the Education Science Reform Act, but to the need to move the field forward with best practices in science education. To gain a better understanding of the needs of students who are visually impaired, educators must learn from them, and qualitative methods will allow the field to do so.

The most recent school reform agenda directed the development of national standards across the academic content areas to improve educational practice and pedagogy. U.S. Department of Education's (1994) Goals 2000: The Educate America Act and its subsequent nationwide implementation largely ignored the involvement of school counseling in school reform efforts. Counselors in schools face the challenge of preparing students to meet the expectations of these higher academic standards and to become well‐educated and contributing members of an ever changing and complex society. The development of the National Standards for School Counseling Programs (American School Counselor Association, 2003) positioned school counseling to play an increasingly important role in contemporary school improvement and in support of the recent educational legislative agenda the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2001).