Child Left Behind Research Articles

Fostering and Achieving Organizational Change

While education research has explored the role of the principal in the advent of No Child Left Behind (2001), quantitative and qualitative studies fail to describe and explain the ways in which principals’ leadership practices are shaped by their conditions. These conditions include the school culture and climate in which they work; their own beliefs, skills, and understandings about leadership; and the actions they implement to achieve their goals. This article presents a conceptual model, resulting from a qualitative multi-case study, that demonstrates the need for—and benefits of—a more sophisticated approach to examining leadership in practice that takes up the psychological and organizational dimensions of leading in schools.

Accountability as an Inhabited Institution: Contested Meanings and the Symbolic Politics of Reform

This paper examines the failed attempt to reauthorize the American educational law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2007. Drawing on existing research on cultural processes of policymaking and insights from inhabited institutionalism, we analyze data from 20 congressional hearings, viewing them as social interactions. We find that hearing participants identified problems with strict accountability policies and, in interpreting those problems, introduced alternative meanings, including “NCLB means children left behind.” Our approach stresses the symbolic politics of reform at the meso level of interaction and makes the case for a cultural analysis of policymaking that synthesizes both interactionism and institutionalism.

Teacher Workforce Developments: Recent Changes in Academic Competitiveness and Job Satisfaction of New Teachers

Policy makers and school leaders are perennially concerned with the capacity of the nation's public schools to recruit and retain highly skilled teachers. Over the past two decades, policy strategies including the federal No Child Left Behind Act and alternative pathways to teaching, as well as changes in the broader labor market, have altered the context in which academically skilled college graduates choose whether to enter teaching, and, if so, where to teach. Using data from 1993 to 2008, we find that schools nationwide are recruiting a greater share of academically skilled college graduates into teaching, and that increases in teachers’ academic skills are especially large in urban school districts that serve predominantly nonwhite students. On the other hand, the increase in the share of academically skilled teachers coincides with the lower likelihood of nonwhite teachers being employed. Once teaching, nonwhite teachers report substantially lower job satisfaction than other teachers. The issue of how to recruit and support an academically skilled and diverse teacher workforce remains pressing.

Accountability as a Design for Teacher Learning: Sensemaking About Mathematics and Equity in the NCLB Era

Using a learning design perspective on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I examine how accountability policy shaped urban educators’ instructional sensemaking. Focusing on the role of policy-rooted classifications, I examine conversations from a middle school mathematics teacher team as a “best case” because they worked diligently to comply with the NCLB. Using discourse analysis, I identify instances of torque in their conversations: when educators’ compliance with accountability logics pulled them away from humanistic goals of education in ways that stood to exacerbate existing educational inequality. This article contributes to documentation on unintended consequences of accountability policies while identifying features that contribute to torque.

Left Behind? Citizen Responsiveness to Government Performance Information

Do citizens respond to policy-based information signals about government performance? Using multiple big datasets—which link for the first time large-scale school administrative records and individual validated voting behavior—I show that citizens react to exogenous school failure signals provided by No Child Left Behind. These signals cause a noticeable increase in turnout in local school board elections and increase the competitiveness of these races. Additionally, I present evidence that school failure signals cause citizens to vote with their feet by exiting failing schools, suggesting that exit plays an underexplored role in democratic accountability. However, performance signals elicit a response unequally, with failure primarily mobilizing high propensity citizens and encouraging exit among those who are white, affluent, and more likely to vote. Hence, while performance signals spur a response, they do so only for a select few, leaving many others behind.

In a World of Disposable Students: The Humanizing Elements of Border Pedagogy in Teacher Education

Abstract: One of the many consequences of a neoliberal, high-stakes policy in No Child Left Behind has been that teachers and administrators have resorted to the systematic removal of vulnerable student groups, such as Latina/o English language learners. This process has dehumanized these students and commodified aspects of their identity, such as language, and deemed them disposable in the pursuit of high test scores. Border pedagogy is one way to address how pre- and in-service educators can be prepared to become critical and empowered educators of border youth in the pursuit of a more just and humanizing education.

Playing with Mathematics: How Play Supports Learning and the Common Core State Standards

International rankings show children in the United States perform well below average in mathematics. There are also large mathematics achievement gaps between children of lower- and higher-socioeconomic status. As today’s teachers face these challenges, they are also faced with the pressures of sweeping educational reforms that arrived with the adoption of No Child Left Behind and continue into the Common Core State Standards era. These strict standards and the implications of low-performance can easily push teachers and parents towards the belief that direct instruction is the only way to help children learn effectively. In this article, we review evidence from the literature about playful learning as an alternative and powerful pedagogical approach. We apply the principles of playful learning to specific state standards for mathematics and illustrate promising ways to improve mathematics learning in the classroom.

No Child Left Behind: A postmortem for Illinois

In this study, the outcomes of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as implemented in Illinois, are evaluated in terms of high school standards testing results between 2003-2013. NCLB was a policy dedicated to closing the gap in schooling outcomes nationally in the space of a decade. There have been few systematic examinations of its macro-level results for those exiting high school, especially considering the attention, time, effort, and money dedicated to its implementation. It has been subsumed into newer reform policies that move forward from the same assumptions and structures without a look back. This is a macro study of the outcomes in one state, Illinois, using its assessment system. Data include Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE) results in reading and math as well as graduation rates from high schools. The data is evaluated across the state as a whole and within categories of urban, suburban, town, and rural. Outcomes in reading, math, and graduation rates remain unchanged across the decade at the state and all community-type categories. Potential problems with implementation and design of NCLB are proposed with the intention of informing current and future policy, especially in regard to continuing a standards/accountability regime under the Common Core.

Reading Achievement in the Middle School Years: A Study Investigating Growth Patterns by High Incidence Disability

ABSTRACTNumerous research studies (e.g., Anderson, Kutash, & Duchnowski, 2001; Lane, Carter, Pierson, & Glaeser, 2006; Volpe, Dupaul, Jitendra, & Tresco, 2009; Wei, Blackorby, & Schiller, 2011) have shown that students with disabilities generally exhibit lower reading scores than their peers without disabilities. However, questions remain about the possibility of longitudinal differences among high-incidence disability classifications (e.g., speech/language impairments, SLI; emotional disturbances, ED; learning disabilities, LD; and attention deficit disorders, ADD). This study investigated growth patterns in reading achievement among middle school students from 5th to 8th grade with different high incidence disability classifications on one state's high-stakes assessment. After a repeated measures analysis of variance and post hoc testing, results reveal that students identified as LD and SLI evidenced more growth in reading than those classified as either ADD or ED. In light of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 legislation, findings about the various growth patterns are discussed with respect to policy, measurement, and practical implications.

On the frontline of CCSS implementation: A national study of factors influencing teachers’ perceptions of teaching conditions and job satisfaction

AbstractThe Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represent an unprecedented change in American education. As an increasingly integral part of the school accountability movement under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, responsibility for implementing CCSS rests largely with school leadership. One important factor in the success or failure of these efforts is the perceptions and experiences of the teachers who will ultimately employ CCSS in the classroom. This survey study examined teachers’ views of CCSS implementation, teaching conditions, collaboration, and job satisfaction. Factor analysis revealed that the openness and activeness of school leadership had a significant effect on teachers’ perceptions of implementation, suggesting that attention to these aspects of leadership is an important consideration during transition to CCSS.

Factors Associated With Accuracy in Prekindergarten Teacher Ratings of Students’ Mathematics Skills

The No Child Left Behind Act requires that 95% of students in all public elementary and secondary schools are assessed in mathematics. Unfortunately, direct assessments of young students can be timely, costly, and challenging to administer. Therefore, policy makers have looked to indirect forms of assessment, such as teachers’ ratings of student skills, as a substitute. However, prekindergarten teachers’ ratings of students’ mathematical knowledge and skills are only correlated with direct assessments at the .50 level. Little is known about factors that influence accuracy in teacher ratings. In this study, we examine the influence of student and teacher characteristics on prekindergarten teachers’ ratings of students’ mathematical skills, controlling for direct assessment of these skills. Results indicate that students’ race/ethnicity and social competency, as well as teachers’ self-efficacy, are significantly related to prekindergarten teachers’ ratings of students’ mathematical skills.

Performance Standards and Employee Effort: Evidence From Teacher Absences

AbstractThe 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title‐1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference‐in‐difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the first year of NCLB on teacher effort in the subsequent year suggest that on average, teacher absences in North Carolina fell by about 10 percent. The probability of being frequently absent similarly decreased. These reductions in teacher absences were driven by within‐teacher increases in effort and by teachers in the bottom half of the effectiveness distribution. On average, only a modest amount of the achievement gains attributable to the increased accountability pressure are explained by the corresponding decline in teacher absences.

Transnational English language learners fighting on an unlevel playing field: high school exit exams, accommodations, and ESL status

Though previous research addresses the negative impact of state-mandated high school exit exams on English language learners’ (ELLs) educational experiences, less attention has been given to how college-oriented ELLs, especially those who attended school in their home countries before coming to the US, handle rigorous exams or gain access to tertiary education. This paper examines how late-entrant transnational ELL students negotiate the linguistic and academic challenges imposed by high school exit exams. Qualitative analyses show that these students deliberately flunk a state-wide English proficiency test mandated by No Child Left Behind and maintain their ELL status in order to avoid losing ELL accommodations, without which they would have little hope of passing the exit exams. This paper argues that such intentional test-failure reveals the role of both teachers and students as policymakers in their own right. The paper further delves into the serious test validity and fairness issues entailed in language education policies in the US and sheds light on the importance of ensuring equitable treatment for ELLs and incorporating the voices of test-taking ELLs and their teachers into policymaking decisions.

Accountability Pressure, Academic Standards, and Educational Triage

Despite common conceptions, evidence on whether No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has had adverse effects for low achieving students is mixed. We hypothesize that the incentive to shift attention away from the lowest achieving students increases with the rigor of state standards. Using panel data from students in North Carolina, we exploit two natural experiments: increases in the rigor of standards in math in 2006 and then again in reading in 2008. We report an increase in test score gaps between low and high achievers and students near grade level. Adverse effects on low achievers are largest in the lowest achieving schools. We discuss the policy implications of our findings given the widespread adoption of more rigorous Common Core Standards.

「沒有孩子落後」之後：NCLB豁免計畫的角色定位、法理基礎與實施爭議之探討

The performance of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has decreased gradually as the concerns of its opponents have been realized. Although NCLB’s advocates have painstakingly collected data for its defense, they are highly frustrated by the fact that NCLB’s ultimate goal of all students reaching 100% proficiency in reading and math in 2014 has failed. To address the problems of NCLB, President Obama proposed the NCLB Waiver in response to congressional partisanship, which has prevented the Elementary and Secondary Education Act from being reauthorized. Because the NCLB Waiver provides states the flexibility for circumventing the flawed provisions of NCLB, nearly all states would apply for the waiver for evading NCLB’s sanctions. The results of this study revealed that the dual purpose of the NCLB Waiver is releasing states from the mandates of NCLB and matching NCLB with Race to the Top; NCLB’s legal foundation is Section 9401 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; and NCLB’s implementation controversy is multidimensional. Finally, this paper proposes five recommendations: (1) precisely citing and interpreting the legal foundation for education change policy; (2) comprehensively considering the integration of enactment and region of education change policy; (3) cautiously coping with the political intervention with and confrontation over education change policy; (4) systematically planning the strategic matching and transition in education change policy; and (5) addressing the quality and social justice of education change policy.

En busca de una educación equitativa: La implementación de políticas lingüísticas y culturales estadounidenses

In the history of the United States, education that is not relevant to the dominant culture, has not been valued (and oftentimes even devalued). The U.S. policies of assimilation in education, tried to dissuade students from maintaining their language and culture. Many of the students who do not speak English as their first language, have been pushed to conform to the imposed mono–cultural rules and, implicitly, have been asked to forget their cultures. This paper exposes the historical context of formal and informal education policies that facilitated the first efforts to provide equitable education, and the policies that have dismantled these efforts. Unfortunately, the efforts and goals achieved thus far, in many cases have not helped improve the education of students who are learning English as a second language. Specifically, this paper focuses on the impact, consequences, and current status of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The Politics of Elementary and Secondary Education Act Waivers

Executive leadership of the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) initiated a flexibility offering from No Child Left Behind. Our work explores specific design decisions made in these state-specific accountability systems as associated with state political environments, resources, and demographic characteristics. Our analysis, focused on 42 states with approved flexibility waivers, provides some evidence that design decisions are associated with prior education policies, political leanings, and financial resources within each state. Policymakers should also take note, as these results suggest that state political factors may influence how state policymakers will react in future negotiations with the USDOE.

Techies, the Tea Party, and the Race to the Top: The Rise of the New Upper-Middle Class and Tensions in the Rightist Politics of Federal Education Reform

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and their associated high-stakes testing are key parts of the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative. There has been considerable resistance to both CCSS and related testing, particularly from conservative actors. This resistance suggests that CCSS has caused substantial tension within the conservative alliance that originally coalesced around No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This article examines the fracturing of the NCLB alliance in response to RTTT and CCSS.

Principled Neglect and Compliance: Responses to NCLB and the CCSS at an Expeditionary Learning Middle School

ABSTRACTThis qualitative study explored educators’ sense making of and responses to No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards at one urban Expeditionary Learning middle school. Sense-making theory (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002) and inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) were used as complementary conceptual frameworks to unpack and analyze teachers’ and administrators’ conceptions, critiques, and responses to these federal initiatives. Analysis revealed that principled neglect and principled compliance were the primary responses to these initiatives, which enabled educators at the school to maintain hands-on, authentic student-centered curriculum and instruction aligned with the Expeditionary Learning philosophy.

Waivers, Federalism, and the Rule of Law

In this article I evaluate recent federal use of waivers from complex, programmatic legislation in light of concerns regarding federalism and the rule of law. I look to the requirements for the rule of law spelled out by legal theorist Lon Fuller, as well as Supreme Court opinions in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and show how large scale waiver structures fail to meet them. Whether specifically provided for in the law or not, waiver provisions related to legislation like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), fail to empower states to engage in cooperative federalism through bargaining with federal regulators. Rather, in effect they force states to comply with discretionary demands of administrators in order to receive waivers and keep federal funding on which they rely.