Abstract
Education reforms in recent decades have increasingly focused on student and teacher outcomes. These reforms mark a movement away from earlier federal policies that concentrated on inputs: on students’ equitable access to educational resources, on compensatory programs, and on social welfare supports (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Educational policies in the Race to the Top-funding era emphasize teachers’ performances and students’ test scores (US Department of Education (DOE), 2009) and thus locate themselves ideologically far from the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954) and the early iterations of Title I legislation. While high expectations for outcomes are not inherently misguided, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era that began in 2002 demonstrated that an exclusive focus on test scores subjects urban schools to extreme pressure and degrades the quality of education offered to low-income students of color (Berliner, 2007; Kim & Sunderman, 2005; Nichols & Berliner, 2007). To gain insight into whether the outcomes demanded of teachers and students were similarly reductive in the first years of RttT-aligned policies, I interviewed urban teachers about how new and longstanding policies impacted their planning and instruction in 2013 and 2014. I wanted to understand how teachers of low-income students of color reacted to and navigated a complex mix of reforms from city, state, and federal levels. I found that teachers described tensions among several types of policies—tensions they often framed as threatening the quality of teaching and learning in their classrooms.
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- 1.
In this chapter, I sometimes refer to low-income students of color as an urban population, and also refer to their teachers as urban educators, following the logic of Noguera (2003). I discuss decisions and policies concerning students of color (the Brown decisions and resultant desegregation policies) and low-income students (Title I legislation), and although these groups of students overlap significantly, they are undeniably distinct (Rothstein, 2013). My use of the term “urban” as a shorthand obscures some of these differences.
- 2.
I focus on policies that teachers discussed most frequently with me in interviews about their planning and instruction.
- 3.
I have changed the names and identifying details of each interviewee.
- 4.
Many interviewees also gave me copies of curricular artifacts including year-long planning calendars, lesson plans, daily assignments, and in-class tests.
- 5.
A number of changes were made to the teacher evaluation process between the first and second years of implementation (see NYC DOE, 2014c).
- 6.
Teachers identified a number of other problems with local assessments: art teacher Ms. Nelson noted that because there were no local assessments in her subject area, her MOSL scores were tied to students’ performance on local English assessments, and thus not to results of her own teaching. Students often questioned the purpose of the local assessments, and when students failed to “take them seriously” during the fall round of administration, teachers sometimes did not object. Tasked with demonstrating student growth between the fall and spring assessments, many teachers viewed the growth as a kind of performance they could elicit simply by introducing and incorporating the exam in their classes differently in the spring than they had done in the fall. Thus teachers positioned student growth on local assessments as a contrived performance—a kind of game to be played (Ball, 2000; see also Anderson, 2009).
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Pierce, J.C. (2016). Incoherent Demands: Outcomes-Focused, Race to the Top-Aligned Policies and Their Impact on Urban Teaching and Learning. In: Noguera, P., Pierce, J., Ahram, R. (eds) Race, Equity, and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23772-5_10
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