Joanne M. Arhar

No Child Left Behind and Middle Level Education: A Look at Research, Policy, and Practice.

As middle level educators across the country are trying to understand and implement the No Child Left Behind Act of2001 (NCLB), documents have been prepared to guide practitioners through this reform initiative. (See for example, NMSAs publication, No Child Left Behind: Implications for Middle Level Leaders (George, 2002) and Opportunities and Accountability to Leave No Child Behind in the Middle Grades: An Examination of the No Child Left Behind Act of2001 prepared by Brown (2002) for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation). The massive federal legislation is designed to improve education by closing the achievement gap between the rich and the poor. While these documents provide excellent summaries of the new law as well as actions that ensure school districts take advantage of the opportunities afforded to middle level educators, what has been left unexamined are the underlying beliefs about education on which NCLB is built, beliefs about teaching and learning, the role of teacher education, and the kind of research that is needed for schools to improve.

What Research Says: The Effects of Teaming and other Collaborative Arrangements

For a long time, middle level teachers have not been perceived as a distinct professional group by the institutions that prepare them, the states that certify them or the researchers that study them. As a result, the effect of any school practice, organizational or otherwise, on the teachers in the middle level institution has not been adequately studied. Therefore, middle school research linked to teacher outcomes is very limited. Middle school research on the teacher

What Research Says: Cooperation, Collaboration, and the Professional Development of Teachers

Editors Note: This is the first of three columns dealing with interdisciplinary teaming. It considers the theoretical and empirical justification for interdisciplinary teaming that is found in the literature on teacher collaboration and cooperative learning. The second part will address the effects of interdisciplinary teaming on the way teachers teach: the last part will deal with the effects of teaming on students.