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In this article, the authors use data from interviews and observations in four urban elementary schools—two high-performing and two probation schools—to examine how schools respond to high-stakes accountability policies. The authors show that school responses to high-stakes accountability depend on the schools’ accountability status. In probation schools, responses focus narrowly on complying with policy demands, focusing on improving the performance of certain students, within benchmark grades, and in certain subject areas. In contrast, higher performing schools emphasize enhancing the performance of all students regardless of grade level and across all subject areas. Given the concentration of poor students and students of color in the lowest performing schools, the authors conclude that issues of educational equity need to be given greater consideration in the implementation of high stakes accountability policies.

This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on implementation, the authors illuminate how school leaders’ sense-making is situated in their professional biographies, building histories, and roles as intermediaries between the district office and classroom teachers.

This article examines how the concentration of low-income African American students in urban elementary schools is deeply coupled with a leveling of teachers' expectations of students and a reduction in their sense of responsibility for student learning. We argue that this process is rooted in school-based organizational habitus through which expectations of students become embedded in schools. We show that this process can be mediated if school leaders engage in practices designed to increase teachers' sense of responsibility for student learning. [organizational habitus, race, class, teacher expectations] Understanding how race and social class stratification is perpetuated from one generation to the next is an enduring problem in educational research. Prior work has examined how structural forces, school-level institutional practices, and students' responses to these structures and practices contribute to social reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron