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Education reform in the United States has unwisely focused attention on standards and accountability to the state as determined by standardized testing (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Mehta, 2013). Stemming from the emphasis on standards-based accountability are the ideas of rapid school "turnaround" and the state's role in this process (Peck & Reitzug, 2014; VanGronigen & Meyers, 2019). The current study employed critical policy discourse analysis to examine the media's portrayal of the 2019 determination to continue or terminate state control of the Little Rock School District. The analysis highlights two argumentative frames--one that emphasized neoliberal values in support of continued state control of the district and another that focused on systemic racism as the basis for advocating for local control of the district. These frames, along with their implications for future actions within the educational policy making process, guide the discussion. Our findings suggest sustained community and media participation is needed to bring attention to education policy issues while underscoring the importance of taking a critical stance to assess media coverage.

This article highlights how future English teachers both construct and reconstruct what English is and what they think it could be., As secondary English language arts (ELA) teachers and teacher educators, we often struggle with the question What is English?--in part due to the tensions in our discipline's complex world. Our [...]

As English language arts teachers, we can probably all attest to the benefits that come from hearing others' ideas about the texts we read. Whether in book club discussions, lunch [...]

Purpose: This study aims to explore the perceived barriers that a secondary English teacher faced when attempting to discuss racial injustice through young adult literature in Mississippi. Design/methodology/approach: The authors rely on Critical Whiteness Studies and qualitative methods to explore the following research question: What are the barriers that a White ELA teacher perceives when teaching about racial injustice through The Hate U Give? Findings: The authors found that there were several perceived barriers to discussing modern racial injustice in the Mississippi ELA classroom. The participating teacher indicated the following barriers: a lack of racial literacy, fears of discomfort and an urge to avoid politics. Originality/value: Much has been written about the urgent need for antiracist teaching practices in secondary English classes. This article explores the barriers a white ELA teacher perceived when attempting to discuss modern racial injustice through literature instruction in a white context of the "four pandemics" (Ladson-Billings, 2021).

Virtual schooling in America is a complex notion, one riddled with simultaneous claims of provenance coupled with poor achievement results when compared to other forms of schooling. Recruitment practices for virtual schools, specifically available television-length advertisements from a national list of fully online schools, comprised a data set around which this study revolved. We examined how virtual school television-length advertisements represented or misrepresented their approach to schooling by utilizing a cultural studies technique of performing preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings. Qualitative analysis--including an independent interrater process--led to findings that often directly contradicted the messages present in the television-length advertisements, as well as currently available research on the performance and practices of virtual schools. Thus, virtual schools should consider the manner in which race, student performance, and teacher quality are portrayed in the teaching, learning, and collaboration of their television-length advertisement recruitment efforts.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explain how the Common Core State Standards may have influenced teachers' practices and philosophies regarding literacy instruction. Conducted in five kindergarten through second-grade classrooms within one elementary school, this research study collected semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and teacher-reported lesson plans over fourteen weeks. We observed that one of the largest instructional shifts due to the implementation of new standards was in the area of informational text use. This change came about not due to the volume of empirical research stating the benefits of such texts, but rather because of an educational policy change. These findings hold implications for K-12 schools and for teacher education programs which are, in many instances, caught between the research, policies, and practice.

When schools in Arkansas and most of the country shut their physical doors and moved to remote instruction in March 2020, Rachel Evans, Christian Goering, and Seth French planned to engage in a multifaceted experience that bridged personal narrative writing, songwriting, and podcasting. Undaunted by the shutdown, they offered Evans' ninth-grade students the opportunity to engage asynchronously in what Evans named The Podcast of Our Lives, a project with three distinct goals: (1) use music to connect to their lived experiences; (2) build from that music as a springboard to write a new original song; and (3) develop a reflective podcast about the songwriting and overall process. Given the traumatic impact of COVID-19 on the well-being of students and teachers across the country, there is an urgent need to design and implement lessons that center student emotions, feelings, thoughts, and voices. Evans' students shifted ideas from one form to another, creating a multimodal podcast while revealing their deep emotions as humans in the middle of a global pandemic. Evans, Goering, and French present the article with the end in mind, providing an example podcast, three stages they used with students, and their reflections and ideas for next steps.

Empathy, an unsung, yet critical element of learning, can be strategically interlaced with literacy instruction and engineering design to create a rich and authentic learning experience for students. Integrated STEM education rests on the promise of engaging students and providing deep understandings through the intentional practice of delivering science and math content through the application of technology and engineering skills. Using children's literature to activate empathy and design thinking can help students become better problem‐solvers, critical thinkers, and caring members of society. Empathy facilitates a deeper connection to the human experience, ensuring that solutions not only meet the design requirements, but also address the emotions and concerns of the end user. Building upon story grammar, students can understand the needs of characters in narratives and create empathetic solutions to the challenges that characters in a book may face, ultimately helping students develop confidence and embrace their future possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the influences of district-related variables on a district's academic performance. Arkansas augmented benchmark examination scores were used to measure a district's scholastic achievement. Spatial analysis fit each district's performance to its geographical location; spatial autocorrelation measured the amount of influence one district's scores has on its neighbours. Regression, both ordinary least squares regression (OLS) and spatial auto regression (SAR), quantified how much a district's academic scores were accounted for by the proportion of white students enrolled, the appraised value of property within a district, and the proportion of students receiving federally assisted lunches. The OLS model was able to account for 30% to 60% of the variation in scores. When ethnicity was predominately white, the district's scores were higher; the more federally assisted lunches a district's enrolment received, the lower scores tended to be. Spatial analysis indicated that a district's performance was highly influenced by the surrounding districts. Major findings showed that, for 2008 data, once fit to an OLS regression model, the spatial dependency completely disappears for mathematics responses, but not literacy. Similar results were seen in 2009 and 2010, though they were not as systematically patterned.

Effective professional development occurs in learning communities where teachers co-construct knowledge with peers about teaching and learning by engaging in meaningful activities. However, only a few studies have examined the complex nature of discourse, participation, and learning in professional development contexts. Grounded in the notion of "communities of practice," this study investigated how middle and high school teachers who participated in a series of professional development activities on implementing Socratic circles in Grades 7-12 classrooms negotiated participation and membership in building a community of practice in and through Socratic circles. Twenty-three teachers were audio- and video-recorded when they participated in 10 discussions as part of a semester-long experience. The discourse analysis demonstrates how the participants negotiated different forms of participation in Socratic circles, and implications for teacher educators and teachers are offered.

This article explores the development of utilizing music as a Personal Practical Theory (PPT) in the teaching of English and history. Specifically, the authors explore the nature of PPT's, the benefits of utilizing music, and the process through which teachers begin using a new approach in their pedagogy. Unique contributions are the application of PPT to a particular teaching strategy and the framing of such strategy within the theory presentation as noted by Chant (2009) and Cornett (1990). The authors discuss their own processes in beginning to use music in their non-music classrooms and generate several pedagogical strategies.

This article examines and offers insights to a year of Socratic circles in the context of a world history classroom. Grounding this practice in relevant research before offering examples from the classroom and providing advice to practitioners, this discussion strategy offers an antidote to the often divisive and destructive examples of interaction in our society, and is a salve to the paucity of true dialogue available to students in the context of a school day. Students benefited by asking better questions, using evidence to support their opinions and arguments, reading more carefully and with a greater sense of purpose, and connecting the past to the present, ultimately gaining perspective on the interplay between ancient times and today.

The article explores how future English teachers are redefining what English is and envisioning what it could be, focusing on constructing ELA spaces that foster joyful literacies and a sense of belonging. Topics include the complex nature of English studies, the impact of restrictive policies on teaching, and the integration of anti-racist, multimodal pedagogies to create inclusive and engaging learning environments.

In many cases, teachers shy away from including much writing because of the many hours it requires to read and provide substantial feedback on such papers. Yet writing is widely understood as critically important to learning (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Mayher, 1983; Zinsser, 1989). This article describes a program from the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project that aims to improve the teaching of academic writing and, in doing so, increase student achievement. The article describes three specific practices used to examine student writing: (1) constructivist coding; (2) calibrating with anchor papers; and (3) affinity mapping. These practices would transfer easily to any professional learning community. While each aspect of collaboration and formative assessment outlined in this article contribute to meaningful professional development, the larger goal is for educators to enact appropriate and meaningful instructional moves with students.

The 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.

What happens when forces attempting to privatize education create and produce a Hollywood film with an education reform plot line? This essay explores "Won't Back Down" through cultural studies and progressive education lenses in an effort to unveil misrepresentations of education and education reform. Drawing on scholarship in these fields, the authors deconstruct pervasive and misleading narratives as they are presented in the film, ultimately revealing that the film acts to further distort or "Hollywoodize" an entity that rests on false premises, the education reform movement. Through careful examination and analysis, the authors conclude that rather than charter schools or the fictionalized Parent Trigger Law, the teachers. unions are the implicit target of the film.

Recent quantitative research on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in schools across Arkansas has discovered that teachers' perceptions of job satisfaction, agency, and professionalism are significantly affected by their school leaders' openness towards autonomy, flexibility, and opinions of teachers (Matlock et al. 2015). The purpose of this article is to expand upon these findings by drawing upon survey and interview data collected from a stratified sample of teachers in a mid-southern state to qualitatively examine the effect CCSS have on teachers' perceptions of their agency and professionalism. The authors then present a contrasting view of teachers' positive perceptions that describe circumstances of teacher autonomy and professional agency.

In 2009 Rupke and Blank noted that the Chinese students in their study sang American songs that the researchers had never heard. This perceived dissonance could have a multitude of causes, but the authors of this article turned their attention to the curriculum used for teaching English in China to further understand the popularity and persistence of some American songs in China. Drawing on literature from teaching the discipline and language of English through the use of popular music, the literature on teaching English in China, and Stuart Hall's seminal "Encoding and Decoding," the authors examined both popular American music and American music utilized in the Chinese curriculum through the lens of cultural studies and their unique experiences teaching English. Data were varied, but all songs examined fell into Hall's "negotiated code," offering potential and limits for "communicative exchanges" between cultures. Recommendations offered include paying more careful attention to the selection process for curricular materials.

In this empirical study which used a mixed-method approach, researchers sought to understand how participation in dramatic oral reading interventions affects both reading fluency and comprehension. The study also investigated how that participation is ultimately limited or promoted by the social context of high schools. Qualitative data are supported by significant quantitative results to identify the many factors at play when adolescents who were identified as struggling with literacy performed oral readings in front of their peers. (Contains 1 table.)

Song with students is fun and accessible to any English language arts teacher, regardless of musical talent or experience. In fact, all one needs is the structure of someone else's [...]