ESSA Research Brief

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): A Research Brief by Samantha Hope, M.T. (March 2017) The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is a modified reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Signed into law on December 10, 2015, it replaces the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 and provides federal guidelines for states regarding various topics in education. This research brief offers an overview of the legislation, as well as its proposed timeline for implementation and implications for schools in the state of Virginia

Cultural Diversity Professional Development for Teachers: A Research Brief

Many regions of the United States have experienced rapid shifts in the racial and ethnic makeup of the population over the past decade. As a result, many of the nation’s schools have undergone significant changes in student demographics. This includes growth in the numbers of Asian, Hispanic, and multi-racial students.1 Regionally, enrollment data reflect this demographic change (figure 1). It is also worth noting that these demographic changes are more dramatic in some schools and communities than others. Aggregate data for the region shows the largest growth in the population of Hispanic students, which increased from 2.98% of the population in the 2003- 04 school year to 10.23% in the 2015-16 school year. This demographic shift has increased the cultural and language diversity of our schools

Why They Stay: Factors Contributing to Second Stage Teachers\u27 Decisions to Remain in Teaching Profession

Teacher attrition, particularly in hard-to-staff urban schools, is a problem addressed by many researchers. Although this research often focuses on novice teachers, those with three or fewer years of experience, there is a growing body of literature that examines second stage teachers, those with between four and 20 years of experience. Like their novice colleagues, these second stage teachers are also at risk of leaving the profession, which can have negative consequences for students. While much of the research focuses on reasons why teachers leave the profession, there is a growing interest in understanding how teachers reach the decision to remain in the profession. Psychological theory and existing scholarship on the work lives of teachers provides one conceptual framework for exploring the topic of teacher retention. The theory of basic psychological needs explains that teachers, like employees in all other professions need to feel fulfillment of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in their professional lives. This contributes to their sense of job satisfaction, or enjoyment, which then makes it more likely for them to remain in the profession. One potential way to help second stage teachers meet these needs and experience job satisfaction is through teacher leadership roles, such as mentoring. The current exploratory study used qualitative methods to interview urban second stage teacher leaders to learn how their experiences fulfill their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, lead to a sense of job satisfaction, and influence their decision to remain in the profession. The participants in this study all had between four and 20 years of experience and all served in a leadership role as a mentor to pre-service teachers through an urban teacher residency program. They shared details and experiences of their professional lives from their decisions to become teachers in the urban school district, through their novice stage of teaching, and into their second stage of teaching, including the decision to take on the complicated leadership role of serving as a mentor to a pre-service teacher through a yearlong residency program. The participants shared experiences which indicated fulfillment of the three basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. They also shared that they felt a sense of satisfaction both from their work as classroom teachers and their role as mentors. Although they experienced need fulfillment and job satisfaction, participants also shared sources of dissatisfaction, and many explained that they were contemplating leaving the profession, with some feeling that teaching is no longer a long-term career. One noteworthy finding is that participants expressed a desire for feeling like a professional, which played a large role in the career decisions they made

The moonlight schools : adult literacy education in the age of Americanization.

This dissertation analyzing the rhetorical interplay between the Moonlight Schools-an adult literacy education program initiated in 1911-and two other literacy programs: the Americanization movement and U.S. college composition. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the Moonlight Schools played a vital role in (re)defining literacy in the public sphere. In particular, exchanges between Moonlight Schools advocates and Americanizers helped to solidify public attitudes regarding the professionalization of literacy teaching-attitudes that remain entrenched in public discourse and that have had negative consequences for the disciplinary status of Rhetoric and Composition. I argue that incorporating the Moonlight Schools into our disciplinary imaginary can help compositionists craft more effective responses to public perceptions of our work. The dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 examines the recurrence of rhetorics of literacy crisis. I argue that these rhetorics exhibit a pattern, one element of which is the development of education programs, like the Moonlight Schools, designed to remedy the illiteracy problem. By examining the subtle differences that occur within each iteration of crisis rhetoric, Rhetoric and Composition can better respond to current invocations of literacy crisis. Chapter 2 analyzes the pedagogies proposed by the Moonlight Schools, Americanizers, and compositionists at the University of Michigan, demonstrating that the pedagogical methods each group enacted reveal how each group conceived of its students, students\u27 value to society, and the role of literacy in society. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on the rhetoric of the Moonlight Schools and Americanization movements; I suggest that though the Moonlight Schools movement invoked a rhetoric of whiteness and nativism to gain support for its educational programs, the movement also worked to promote an image of immigrants as both literate and intelligent and of non-white people as worthy of educational opportunity. Chapter 4 analyzes the Moonlight Schools\u27 and Americanizers\u27 models of professionalization, and argues that the public discourse created by the two groups both encouraged specialized training for teachers and dismissed the need for such training. Chapter 5 details how this discourse continues to influence attitudes toward literacy education

Developing strategies for creating an environmental focus in a school: narrating the change process

Effective environmental education goes beyond raising environmental awareness and developing positive environmental values, to the encouragement of personal responsibility and action in response to contextual environmental issues in particular. The whole school approach has been advocated as the best approach to environmental education, based on the assumption that the values and attitudes espoused in the classroom need to be reflected in the day-to-day school practice. By practising what they teach, schools reinforce values with action. In contrast, inconsistencies between the formal and non-formal curriculum may lead young people to question the integrity of their teachers or condition them to accept such inconsistencies as cultural and social norms, which in turn may lead to apathy about the environment. Adjustments to the ethos of a school to foreground the environment, both within the curriculum , the management of the school and the behaviour of teachers, pupils and support staff, is not a straightforward undertaking. Institutional factors influence the change process in schools and each school presents a unique context. It is, therefore, difficult to develop a general strategy for the evolution of an environmental ethos. This case study narrates an attempt to implement a change towards an improved environmental focus in a school, and focuses on developing an understanding of how available resources can assist this process while engaging with complexity of change

Understanding Teacher Morale

This study emerged from discussions within the Policy and Planning Council of the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC), a research alliance between Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education and seven surrounding school divisions. The project has two goals. The first goal is to develop an understanding of the factors that impact teachers’ experience of their work in the current PK12 public school context. Although this topic could be, and has been, investigated through a number of lenses (e.g., burnout, trust, motivation), this project focuses on the idea of teacher morale, a choice that will be discussed in detail in the next section of the report. The study addresses the following three questions: 1. How do teachers experience job satisfaction and morale? 2. What are the dynamics between a teacher’s job related ideal and the professional culture of the school that support or hinder the experience of job satisfaction and morale? 3. How do differences between schools related to policy context and social context affect the dynamics of job satisfaction and morale? To answer these questions MERC assembled a research team comprised of a university researcher, graduate students, and a team of school personnel from the MERC school divisions. Over the course of two years, the team developed a conceptual framework for understanding teacher morale, designed a research study that involved observing and interviewing teachers (n=44) across three purposefully selected middle schools in the Richmond region, and then collected and analyzed the data. This report shares both the process and the findings of this collaborative research effort. The second goal of this research project is to support action by local policy makers, school division leaders, central office personnel, principals, and teachers. The study was commissioned by local school leaders not just to document and reflect on teacher morale, but more importantly to do something about it. As argued above, teachers and the conditions of teachers’ work matters for our students, our schools, and the well being of our communities and society. In this regard, this report is only one piece of this project’s action and impact plan. While the report does contain a series of recommendations based on findings and how they can be used, the release of the report is tied to additional dissemination and professional development efforts designed to effect change

Profiling Volatile Constituents of Homemade Preserved Foods Prepared in Early 1950s South Dakota (USA) Using Solid-Phase Microextraction (SPME) with Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) Determination

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