This article examines how four urban elementary teachers designed their literacy instruction in ways that sought to sustain students' cultural competence-maintaining their language and cultural practices while also gaining access to more dominant ones-amid expectations to prepare students for high-stakes testing. A large part of their teaching involved taking their students' backgrounds into account and selecting classroom texts to provide examples of the contributions made by successful culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse people with space for dialogue about inequity.A major concern in the education field is how U.S. schools respond to culturally and linguistically diverse students, knowing that in many ways, schools contribute to their marginalization and deficit-oriented perspectives (

This article examines how one elementary school was divided into two schools-a primary and an intermediate school-because of how policies were interpreted and enacted with regard to high-stakes testing. The grades in which students took high-stakes tests were privileged in terms of receiving monetary resources and support from staff. An emphasis on testing also influenced how bilingual education was addressed. These organizational decisions highlight how policy operated as a practice of power, where inequitable education outcomes were reproduced. [education policy, high-stakes testing, school organization, elementary school] Schools are social organizations full of complex relationships as well as structures, processes, and norms where different ideologies, purposes, and goals play out (Riehl 2001). Organizing these complex systems requires attention to how and why decisions are made and how things get done, such as understanding how school policies get made. School policies are created in response to and reflect changes in education policy and the larger context in which education is situated.In this article, I present data from a yearlong ethnographic study of one urban Texas elementary school's enactment and interpretation of policies. This study elucidates the richness and complexity of the policy process. It highlights how the lived experiences of people in the school are embedded in a larger institutional context. I show how the staff members' anticipation of high-stakes testing and the consequences of low performance spurred organizational decisions that resulted in uneven attention and support for teachers and students. Specifically, support was imbalanced in the forms of monetary resources and the use of staff members to support teachers and students. Bilingual education was another area that was impacted. The result was that the school was divided into a primary school and an intermediate school based on testing. This split marginalized the primary grades' students and teachers and distorted schooling experiences as a direct outcome of testing pressures. Education PolicyThis study builds on scholarship that considers how education policy gets interpreted, implemented, and mediated at the school level. Policy is a set of normative guidelines that intentionally work to provide order and organization. It is a complex social practice and process consisting of many layers. The passing of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002 in the United States highlights neoliberal ideologies and discourses about student accountability that continue to prevail and inform national policy and school reform (Ball 2009; Hursh 2007;Sturges 2015). Since then, standards-based reform efforts have been the primary approach to creating change in American schools. With origins in A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983), standards-based reform has prompted accountability movements consisting of state-mandated achievement tests to hold districts, schools, teachers, and students accountable for meeting certa...

Elementary students find themselves engaged and learning at a digital writing camp. The authors find that such elementary students usually have limited access to technology at home and school, and posit that teachers should do all they can to give them more access to and experience in digital composing. Students were motivated and learned to use technology through experimentation and collaboration, the authors said, adding that technology had a positive effect on the students’ writing process and final products.

This ethnographic study reports on one elementary literacy coach's response to highstakes testing and her approach to support third-through fifth-grade teachers in a Title I school in Texas. Sources of data included field notes and observations of classes and meetings, audio/video recordings, and transcribed interviews. The findings illustrate how the literacy coach used her knowledge and beliefs about teaching reading along with her position of leadership to craft alternative responses to an environment that endorsed a skills-based approach to teaching reading and placed a strong emphasis on test preparation. Specifically, the literacy coach enriched the skills-based reading curriculum with reading workshop, supported teachers' learning and growth with teacher-centered inquiry groups, and focused on language and authentic literature as a way of preparing students for the test. These findings suggest that the literacy coach played an important role in supporting teachers with negotiating the demands of a high-stakes testing environment and in ways that did not necessarily compromise the literacy coach's beliefs. These findings also suggest the importance of a supportive school environment where teachers have a sense of community for support and professional growth.

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