New teachers of color and culturally responsive teaching in an era of educational accountability: Caught in a double bind

The purpose of this article is to examine how and to what extent schools’ responses to accountability policies in the United States influence the ability of new teachers of color to draw on their own and their students’ cultural resources to engage in culturally responsive teaching. A 5-year study of 17 new teachers of color reveals that these teachers identified three principal tensions which correspond to the three dimensions of culturally responsive teaching: (a) cultural and linguistic relevance versus standardization, (b) community of learners versus teacher transmission, and (c) social justice versus enhanced test scores. The teachers also described two mechanisms by which accountability-based programs and policies were enforced: fear of monitoring and internalizing the link between testing and educational opportunity. We applied the metaphor of “double bind” to explain the tensions and enforcement mechanisms encountered by these teachers. The “double bind” forced the new teachers of color to enact contradictory systemic demands promoted by government policy and the teaching profession and exacted an individual toll. We conclude with implications for policy, practice, and research.     

Flexible learning and design of instruction

The paper deals with the problem of designing flexible learning and instruction. Flexibility is considered both from the learner's and the designer's perspective. The potential of telematics in the design, development and implementation of flexible and distance learning is discussed. A Method for flexible instructional modules development is presented which aims at assisting the educational designers in the development of flexible instructional modules, ie, modules, which are easily adaptable to different learner's needs, allow learner's choices and different delivery platforms, including distance delivery. Examples of Method applications and current development of a software system to facilitate the Method's implementation are reported.     

Using and updating local norms

The most useful kind of norms are local norms collected by a test interpreter on a population with which s/he is familiar. We present a rationale for the use of local norms and a procedure, illustrated with an example, for updating a norm group's test score mean and variance. It was concluded that test interpreters should build local norms to be used in conjunction with norms based on a national sample, since local norms can be more recent, relevant, and representative for local groups.