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Literature examining the context of reception reveals how various structural and cultural factors shape newcomers' experiences, and thus their opportunities for integration. Fewer studies explore how school districts are situated in this broader context of reception, or how district policies and practices for newcomers are enabled or constrained by the local context. This study draws on a zones of mediation framework to examine how external forces mediated districts' approaches to serving growing numbers of immigrant and refugee newcomers. Analysis of interviews with 57 stakeholders from across three districts revealed that the presence or absence of community-based support networks, as well as the extent to which local policies and perceptions emphasized inclusion, mediated districts' programmatic approaches. Implications for district and community leaders are discussed.

With the 2015 passage of the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA), the oversight of language policy in U.S. schools shifted from federal to state governance. Although the education of students officially designated as English learners (ELs) has historically been grounded in federal law, we argue that ELs' educational experiences are also largely influenced by societal attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. Using a critical policy analysis (CPA) approach, we examine how 12 states' immigrant policy contexts are associated with the EL educational policies articulated in their ESSA implementation plans. We find that states' demographic and immigrant policy contexts combine to produce four distinct approaches toward EL education, from departing to approaching equity.

As spaces for researchers and practitioners to engage in long-term, mutual collaborations aimed at addressing problems of practice in education, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) offer rich contexts for research use. Our study examines how interactions between researchers and practitioners shape opportunities for research use in a professional association engaged in RPP activities focused on fostering change in statewide K-12 science education. Drawing on a conceptualization of RPPs as joint work at boundaries, we show how both researchers and practitioners facilitated research use. Furthermore, research use was facilitated by brokers' engagement in RPP activities and with shared pieces of research. Findings affirm the role that brokers play in connecting research and practice and identify specific activities that may be useful in facilitating research use in RPPs.

The back and forth migration of children and youth between the United States and Mexico has created a unique group of approximately nine million "students we share" who have been educated in both countries (Jensen and Sawyer 2013). The social, political, and economic interconnectivity of the United States and Mexico suggests that these trends are likely to continue, making the education of transnationally mobile students, or those students who have formative schooling experiences in both countries, a topic in critical need of research. This article presents findings from a systematic literature review and describes how sociopolitical, sociocultural, sociolinguistic, and socioemotional factors influence transnationally mobile students' educational experiences. We assert that future research on transnational education within the US-Mexico nexus and beyond should attend to the interconnectedness of these dimensions, rather than viewing them in isolation.

Purpose: Alongside the inequities surfaced by COVID-19, a confluence of demographic and policy-related shifts over the last few decades has elevated the education of multilingual learners (MLs) in state education agency (SEA) leaders' work. This study employs an ecological perspective to examine how SEA leaders promote social justice policy implementation in their efforts to uphold MLs' civil rights under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Research Methods: Given its embeddedness in a research-practice partnership (RPP) that emphasizes integration of researchers' expertise with SEA leaders' real-world knowledge, the study employs a participatory research approach. Drawing on 23 semistructured interviews with SEA leaders and 20 hours of observations during RPP meetings, the authors engaged in an iterative analysis process involving coding, memoing, and extensive member checking. Findings: Findings show the dual roles that leaders played to uphold the spirit of civil rights law across local education agencies (LEAs) and within SEAs, and they highlight the structural, cultural, and political dynamics that operated to enable or constrain this work. The study also reveals that cross-state collaboration may be a powerful mechanism for upholding ML civil rights in ways that go beyond compliance toward transformation and social justice. Implications: Although ESSA expanded the role of the SEA in policy implementation, little attention has been given to supporting state-level organizational development. Our findings suggest the need to allocate resources to support SEA capacity development. Such support is ever more critical as state systems work to develop coherent and aligned supports in response to COVID-19-related disparities.

Under federal civil rights law, U.S. school districts have a dual obligation to provide students identified as English learners (ELs) with designated English-language development (ELD) instruction and integrated ELD support during core content instruction. Drawing on an analysis of interviews with 96 educators in two large California districts, we use an ecological approach to explore how district and school staff navigated the provision of designated ELD at the secondary level. Findings revealed that state and school structures shaped district culture in ways that deemphasized designated ELD for ELs across proficiency levels. Rather than emphasizing integrated ELD approaches that foster language development through content, however, these structural and cultural dynamics meant that many ELs received few, if any, linguistic supports. Although federal oversight and leaders' agency helped to shift this trend and support ELs' access to ELD, the primary mode of delivery was through required ELD courses, which research shows can preclude ELs' access to core content. These findings have important implications for policymakers and leaders seeking to ensure that all ELs have equitable access to language and content instruction.

Purpose: Although schools across the United States are becoming increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse, many teachers remain underprepared to work with students classified as English learners (ELs), especially at the secondary level. Acknowledging the importance of developing systems of support for teachers of ELs, this paper examines the district- and school-level factors shaping secondary teachers' access to EL-focused professional learning in one large urban school district. Design/methodology/approach: To examine teachers' access to EL-focused professional learning, the authors draw on 49 in-depth interviews with district leaders and staff from nine secondary schools. Data analysis was guided by a structure, culture and agency theoretical framework. Findings: Findings revealed that decreased structural support, in terms of both fiscal and human resources, constrained teachers' access to EL-related professional learning. Further, the district culture was characterized by limited understanding of ELs' backgrounds and assets. While some school leaders exercised agency to bolster EL-focused professional learning for teachers, such supports were rare. Practical implications: Findings help to contextualize secondary teachers' feelings of unpreparedness to serve ELs, illuminating several factors that district and school leaders should attend to in order to bolster the development of professional capital for teachers of ELs at the secondary level. Originality/value: While prior research outlines the importance of designing systems of support for EL-focused professional learning, this study highlights specific structural and cultural factors shaping such systems.

Local control has been a bedrock principle of public schooling in America since its inception. In 2013, the California Legislature codified a new local accountability approach for school finance. An important component of the new California Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) approach is a focus on English learners (ELs). The law mandates that every school district produce a Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) to engage the local community in defining outcomes and determining funding for ELs. Based on an exploratory analysis of a representative sample of LCAPs, we show that, although California's new approach offered an opportunity to support locally-defined priorities and alternatives to top-down accountability, few if any districts had yet taken full advantage of the opportunity. That is, the school districts in our sample had not yet engaged with the local community to facilitate significant changes to accountability or redistribution of funding and resources to support educational equity for ELs.

District and school leaders face the challenge of designing and implementing supports for immigrant newcomers who have recently arrived in the US, speak little English, and are unfamiliar with the US school system. This study draws on 117 interviews with educators in six purposefully-sampled school districts across the country to examine the factors that shaped newcomer educational services across grades K-12. Findings reveal that, although district leaders held particular ideals around positive and negative equality that aligned with their policy designs, how these policies were implemented depended on organizational capacity and resources, as well as school-based perceptions of newcomer needs.

This article presents an integrated systematic review of scholarship related to preparing preservice teachers (PSTs) to teach multilingual learners in U.S. schools. We drew from cultural-historical activity theory to investigate how teacher educators who focus on preparing PSTs to work with multilingual students attended to the linguistically responsive teaching (LRT) framework. We identified three distinct activity systems, each linked to specific LRT dimensions. The ways in which the components of each activity system integrated LRT have implications for both theory and practice. Specifically, our findings highlight the need for program-wide coherence in teacher preparation and for comparative analysis examining teacher education across diverse policy contexts.

In this introduction, we establish why school leaders must be attentive to how the organization of educational programs for English Learners impacts the degree to which they are segregated or integrated. We preview each article in the special issue and clarify the contributions that these pieces collectively make to research and practice. We argue that taken together the articles make the case that school leaders must balance separation and integration in a way that fosters equity of opportunity and affirms English Learners' multilingual and multicultural identities.

We study how a suburban U.S. district in the early stages of demographic change developed systems of support for teachers of English learners (ELs). Using district- and school-level social network and interview data, we examine elementary teachers' EL-related professional learning opportunities, and how district and school organizational contexts enabled or constrained these opportunities. We find that the separation of language and content at the district level limited teachers' learning opportunities, yet school leaders mitigated this separation by implementing structures that fostered norms of shared responsibility and collaborative teaching. Findings highlight the relevance of an organizational perspective for understanding how suburban districts respond to demographic change, and have implications for policymakers and practitioners with respect to creating inclusive environments for ELs.

The United States is facing a bilingual teacher shortage, a fact that is particularly troubling as the emergent bilingual population continues to grow nationwide. Prior research suggests that the shortage of bilingual teachers may affect the quality of instruction emergent bilinguals receive, yet little is known about the potential effects of this shortage on schools more broadly. In this article, we draw on the concept of teacher leadership to explore whether and how bilingual teachers contribute outside the classroom. Our mixed methods approach drew on surveys and interviews with elementary teachers in eight school districts across three states and identified the ways in which bilingual teachers acted as informal teacher-leaders who supported colleagues' professional development and parent engagement. Findings have important policy implications for policy in terms of supporting bilingual teachers' recruitment and retention, as well as for research on bilingual teacher leadership.

School systems around the world are adopting more intellectually ambitious academic content in the hopes of improving their educational productivity. In the United States, these efforts have required significant changes to teachers' instructional practices, and increased attention to teachers' formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities. Focusing on the initial implementation of a reform-oriented approach to teaching mathematics in two local school systems in the United States, this paper examines whether -- and under what circumstances -- elementary teachers' professional learning opportunities predict changes in their instructional practices and beliefs related to mathematics. Our findings reveal that teachers' on-the-job interactions during the first year of reform predicted changes in their instructional practices; further, these changes were associated with the infrastructures that local school systems created to support teacher learning in mathematics. Teachers' participation in formal professional development, in contrast, predicted changes in their instructional beliefs, but not their practices. These findings have implications for future efforts to design formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities that support ambitious educational reforms.

Recent scholarship suggests that research use is an interactive, social phenomenon, and that brokers play important roles in facilitating the exchange of research evidence. We add to this body of literature by exploring the role of brokers in the exchange of research evidence among state education agency leaders involved in K-12 science education policy implementation in the United States. We focus our study on the lead professional association for state science policymakers, the Council of State Science Supervisors (CSSS), because professional associations are the most prominent source of research for state and local education leaders, and are important for supporting the use of research evidence and policy implementation. Our findings, based on analysis of social network survey data, highlight the complex brokering roles CSSS members, and especially leaders in the association, played. These brokers not only enabled association members' access to diverse sources of research, but also facilitated between-state research exchanges. Our findings have implications for research and theory on brokering, and they point to the importance of professional associations for facilitating access to research to support education policy implementation.

While current reform efforts press for ambitious changes to teachers' instructional practice, teachers' instructional beliefs are also consequential in such efforts as beliefs shape teachers' instructional practice and their responses to instructional reforms. This article examines the relationship between teachers' instructional ties and their beliefs about mathematics instruction in one school district working to transform its approach to elementary mathematics education. Quantitative results show that while teachers' beliefs did not predict with whom they interacted about mathematics instruction, teachers' interactions with peers about mathematics instruction were associated with changes in their beliefs over time. Qualitative analysis confirms and extends these findings, revealing how system-level changes in the district's educational infrastructure facilitated change in teachers' beliefs about mathematics instruction at scale.

This paper describes a Networked Improvement Community comprised of a network of 13 states focused on improving coherence and equity in state systems of science education. Grounded in principles of improvement science adapted from healthcare, we are developing and testing resources for formative assessment in science, with the aim of developing systems where actors at every level of the education system are oriented toward a common vision for science, and where there is a common commitment to equity. The paper describes these strategies and implications of this work for district-level change efforts.

The 2015 federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) affords states flexibility in adopting accountability measures that assess opportunity to learn, and requires that state and district leaders use evidence-based interventions to address any inequities. For English learners (ELs) at the secondary level, one important measure of opportunity to learn is access to and completion of rigorous, college preparatory coursework. Drawing from ESSA's definition of "evidence-based," which aligns closely with requirements for EL programs outlined by Castañeda, we propose course taking as a valid and reliable statewide indicator of student success, and offer recommendations for local interventions that would support secondary ELs' opportunity to learn.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study describes how cognitive, normative, and regulative mechanisms shape bilingual teachers' language policy implementation in both English-only and bilingual contexts. Aligned with prior educational language policy research, findings indicate the important role that teachers' beliefs play in the policy implementation process. However, findings also reveal several other dimensions of the policymaking process that contribute to the coupling of language policy and classroom practice, including district-level policy, administrative oversight, and teacher training policies. This study thus offers an institutional view of language policy implementation that accounts for teachers' beliefs in a more nuanced and realistic way. Results from the study suggest the need to respond to both individual- and systems-level policy mechanisms--and the interplay between them--when designing school systems that address the educational needs of English language learners, whose presence is increasing in districts and schools across the United States.

This paper explores the context of reception for immigrant students and English learners in one medium-sized suburban school district in the northeastern United States. Using qualitative methods, the authors describe how, despite a troubling context of reception emerging from a normative and political community context that harbored resentment toward the new immigrant population, a community-based organization whose members served as boundary spanners between the school district and the community helped prompt district leaders toward more equity-minded policies. Given increasing culturally and linguistically diverse student populations in suburban school districts across the United States, findings from this paper have important implications for community engagement and school district policymaking.

Although social ties are a necessary condition for social capital, there is a dearth of research on the factors associated with the existence of such ties among school staff. Using a mixed-methods approach, we examined the role of both formal organizational infrastructure and individual characteristics in shaping advice and information interactions about instruction among school staff within and between schools. Our findings from social-network models showed that, while individual characteristics were associated with within- and between-school ties, aspects of the formal school organization had larger effects. Moreover, having a subject-specific leadership position most strongly predicted between-school ties. Our analysis of interview data supported and extended these findings, showing that leadership positions worked in tandem with other aspects of the organizational infrastructure, such as organizational routines, to influence school staff members' interactions about instruction.

Scholars have become increasingly interested in what is often referred to as the instructional guidance infrastructure (IGI). Research has identified the characteristics of infrastructures that make them more or less influential in guiding teachers' instruction, such as alignment, authority, and prescriptiveness. Although these are important, a key question is whether and how IGIs work to influence teachers' beliefs and practices. We use new institutional theory to theorize relations between IGIs and teachers' beliefs about how students learn mathematics in two local school systems undergoing instructional reform. Based on new institutional theory, we explore how the three pillars of institutions--regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive--worked in interaction to shape teachers' beliefs. In doing so, we develop a more comprehensive framework for examining IGIs and how they operate.

A central challenge for local education agencies (i.e., school districts in the United States) undergoing reform is to design systems that facilitate instructional improvement. At the core of these systems are educational infrastructures that bolster capacity building efforts and support teaching and leadership practices. Our goal for this special issue is to apply infrastructure as a framework to understand educational change processes across a variety of contexts and levels of the education system (i.e., state, district, school, classroom). Taken together, the articles in this issue reveal how infrastructure can support and/or constrain educational change to the extent that it is deeply connected to, taken up in, and/or transformed by teaching and leadership practice.

In the context of shifting demographics and standards-based reform, school districts in new immigrant destinations are charged with designing infrastructures that support teaching and learning for English learners (ELs) in core academic subjects. This article uses qualitative data and social network analysis to examine how one district in the midwestern United States organized EL instruction. After describing the district's infrastructure for elementary EL education, we examine how this infrastructure supported teachers' work practice--the practices in which teachers engage with one another--as operationalized around instructional advice and information networks. Findings reveal that teachers' opportunities to learn about EL instruction varied significantly by the school subject and that these differences were directly related to the way in which the district built its EL educational infrastructure.

Background: Research over the past two decades documents how social capital, or the resources attained through social relationships, is associated with a range of outcomes at both the individual and organizational levels. Yet few, if any, studies explore the relationship between social capital and teaching self-efficacy. Given that teaching self-efficacy is a significant predictor of instructional effectiveness, identifying the kinds of social interactions that facilitate positive teaching self-efficacy can offer important information with respect to how schools and school systems can bolster teachers' perceived competence and thus their instructional capacity. Objective: This study integrates social capital and social cognitive theories to frame an investigation of the social sources that contribute to teachers' self-efficacy over time. Specifically, we explore how social interactions that vary in their relationship with and proximity to instruction influence teachers' developing self-efficacy. Research Design: We analyzed self-report survey data from 345 teachers in the same district over 4 years. These data captured various social sources of teaching self-efficacy, including indicators of verbal persuasion and vicarious experiences, and allowed us to account for contextual variables found to influence teachers' sense of mastery. We used the multilevel model for change framework to explore associations between these types of social interactions and teacher self-efficacy over time. Findings: Results suggest that interactions firmly rooted in actual teaching practice--namely, those focused on a specific instructional episode (i.e., feedback about a class) or on particular teaching practices (i.e., discussions about specific teaching resources and artifacts)--were associated with higher reports of teaching self-efficacy over time. On the other hand, interactions that reflected more general or less targeted interactions about teaching (i.e., being sought out for general instructional advice or observing someone else teach) were not. Conclusions: To further the capacity of individual teachers, school and system leaders should invest in supporting social interactions among teachers that afford direct and targeted opportunities to learn about particular instructional practices and to discuss specific teaching episodes. Interactions less proximal to classroom practice may be ineffective for promoting individual teachers' feelings of teaching competence.

While few would disagree that a key component of educating teachers to teach happens on the job, research rarely explores the schoolhouse as a site for teacher education. This study thus focuses on inservice as distinct from preservice teacher education and explores how beginning teachers' learning about mathematics and literacy instruction was supported within 24 elementary schools in two midwestern school districts. A mixed methodology was used in this exploratory study, including social network and interview data analysis, to examine beginning teachers' advice- and information-seeking behaviors related to mathematics and literacy. Findings revealed that formal organizational structures inside schools were critical for shaping beginning teachers' opportunities to learn about instruction, including grade level teams and formal leadership positions.

Designing infrastructures to support instruction remains a challenge in educational reform. This article reports on a study of one school system's efforts to redesign its infrastructure for mathematics instruction by promoting teacher leadership. Using social network and interview data from 12 elementary schools, we explore how the district's infrastructure redesign efforts were internally coherent with and built upon existing infrastructure components. We then explore relations between infrastructure and school practice as captured in the instructional advice- and information-seeking interactions among school staff, finding that teacher leaders emerged as central actors and brokers of advice and information about mathematics within and between schools. Further, changes in school advice and information networks were associated with shifts in teachers' beliefs about and practices in mathematics toward inquiry-oriented approaches consistent with district curriculum. We argue that the district's redesign efforts to support teacher leadership coupled district curriculum and school and classroom practice in mathematics. (Contains 4 tables and 3 figures.)

Newcomer young men confront numerous obstacles that limit their chances for attainment and achievement. Using social and cultural capital frameworks and a case study methodology, this article examines how four Latino newcomer young men navigated an urban U.S. high school. It reveals how teachers and a counselor cultivated capital and how the young men leveraged this capital, thus challenging traditional depictions of Latino immigrant adolescents and highlighting the importance of belonging for these youth.

This article presents a set of recommendations that promote a more nuanced, meaningful accountability policy for English learners in the next authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The authors argue that the ESEA reauthorization must strengthen the law's capacity-building purpose so that federal, state, and local leaders support continued attention, direction, and innovation in effectively educating ELs. The recommendations put forth in this article focus on monitoring both current and former ELs, establishing time frames for the attainment of English language proficiency, and setting expectations for academic achievement that are reflective of English language proficiency level and time in the state's school system. (Contains 3 figures and 4 notes.)

Teaching, the core technology of schooling, is an essential consideration in investigations of education systems and school organizations. Taking teaching seriously as an explanatory variable in research on education systems and organizations necessitates moving beyond treating it as a unitary practice, so as to take account of the school subjects implicated in the work. Building on and extending earlier work, in this paper we examine subject matter differences in how one education system (Local Educational Agency) and its elementary schools organize for instruction in the core elementary school subjects. Specifically, this paper explores how education leaders and teachers in one local American school district interact with one another with respect to advice and information about teaching and learning in literacy, mathematics and science. We examine similarities and differences in school staff members' advice and information networks and consider how these differences relate to the formal organizational infrastructure intended to support instruction.

This article examines the unique contributions that bilingual and bilingually credentialed teachers make to the instruction of emergent bilinguals in the United States. This mixed methodological study involved 474 teachers in Arizona, California, and Texas, which represent distinct language policy contexts. Results revealed that, irrespective of context, teachers' bilingualism and bilingual certification significantly predicted their reported use of practices that build on students' primary language as well as their prior knowledge and experiences. Given declining numbers of teachers completing bilingual credentials in English-only states, findings suggest that English-only policies are diminishing the supply of teachers with the potential to improve emergent bilinguals' classroom experiences.

In response to the passage of a state English-only policy and a newly mandated instructional model for English learners that focuses on English acquisition, Arizona introduced training requirements for all of the state's educators related to English learners. This policy coincided with changes in the training Arizona teachers opted to pursue, where more teachers chose to complete state mandated training that focuses on English-only strategies rather than more extensive training in English as a second language or bilingual education. Using data from teacher surveys, this article examined the relationship between teachers' training and their self-reported instructional practices. Findings revealed that, in every instance, holding a teaching endorsement in English as a second language or bilingual education had a positive, significant relationship with teachers' reported use of effective instructional approaches for ELs, while holding the state mandated endorsement was never significantly related to teachers' practices. These trends are cause for concern, as they indicate that Arizona's teacher policy may be undermining teachers' capacity to work with English learners and limiting English learners' learning opportunities.

Maria was a fifth grade student when the authors met her in a study of immigrant child-language brokers. Her family immigrated from a farming community in Mexico to a Chicago suburb where there were limited bilingual resources. Maria's mother did not speak fluent English, and Maria's teachers did not speak Spanish, so Maria often served as a translator during parent-teacher conferences. How did Maria navigate her role in an event often considered the cornerstone of home-school communication (Hanhan, 1998)? In this article, the authors share what they learned from their longitudinal research, which is reported in more detail in previous studies (see Garcia-Sanchez & Orellana, 2006; Orellana, 2009). They hope these recommendations will help teachers understand the complexities of translation, and how to facilitate parent-teacher conferences when their students serve as translators. (Contains 1 footnote.)

In this article, the author offers suggestions for reconceptualizing the Teach for America (TFA) program. She recommends that TFA develop a residency training model with the following features: (1) Extend the program's current two-year commitment to three years; (2) Require first-year corps members to complete a residency year in an experienced teacher's classroom within their placement district and at (or near) their placement grade level; (3) Cluster TFA "residents" at high-performing urban schools; (4) Offer courses through a university partner for first-year corps members to obtain certification and a master's degree; and (5) Provide incentives to teach longer than three years.

The quality of the teacher in the classroom is the most important factor in raising student achievement, as Linda Darling-Hammond noted, and educators should offer their students nothing less than well-trained and well-supported teachers. Providing high-quality teachers is of particular importance in low-income communities of color, where the most underprepared teachers are consistently placed and where students continually underperform in comparison to their middle-class white counterparts. Ms. Darling-Hammond describes the detrimental outcomes of the present system, one that continues to fail its students. In this article, the author argues that with its current approach, Teach for America (TFA) is not patching the "hole in the bucket" of America's teaching supply. When almost one-third of new entrants to the teaching profession leave within three years and nearly half leave within five years, TFA's two-year approach may do little more than offer a temporary plug. The author believes that in order to maintain a teaching force, particularly in the nation's most underserved communities, and to ensure this force is of the highest quality, a "systemic solution'' must be put forward. Such a systemic solution includes recruiting, preparing, and retaining excellent teachers for all students. (Contains 14 endnotes.)

Soon after the author began her first year as a Teach for America (TFA) corps member, she realized how underprepared she felt teaching first grade. Although she grew as an educator over time and still committed to working in education, it was an uphill battle. And, like most other TFA corps members, she left teaching within the first three years. In the light of her experience, the author recommends the following alterations in the preparation of corps members: (1) Extending the TFA commitment to three years; (2) Converting the first year of teaching to a residency training year, offering classroom training with expert veteran teachers while corps members also complete coursework toward certification; and (3) Offering incentives for corps members to teach longer than three years. The author recommends these changes with the goal of improving the effectiveness of corps members and motivating TFA teachers to remain in their assignments for longer than two or three years. (Contains 9 footnotes.)