This thesis is an analysis of teacher perceptions of the implementation of their school's comprehensive school reform, and the George W. Bush administration's federal educational policy, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Data were collected by a research team as a part of the National Longitudinal Evaluation of Comprehensive School Reform (NLECSR), a project under the direction of the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The thesis is a supplemental qualitative analysis by the author who was part of the NLECSR research team from 2004 through 2005. The NLECSR had a quantitative component (called the Core Study) consisting of a large-scale national survey, and a qualitative component (called the Focus Study) consisting of interviews and observations in a smaller subset of schools in five urban districts in the central and eastern United States. AIR was primarily responsible for the quantitative study while researchers at USF were responsible for the qualitative work. This thesis exploited a major strength of the Focus Study, which made classrooms within schools the unit of analysis. This thesis analyzed data from three schools from one of the five Focus Study districts. Three research questions predominate: First, what do teachers who are implementing CSR say about how NCLB impacts their work? Second, what do teachers' responses reveal about how well NCLB as a policy aligns or misaligns with implementing CSR? Third, where might these perceived policy conflicts lie? Thematic analysis revealed perceived competing pressures in the development of social capital, or the collective commitment, relational trust and communications that foster productive or supportive exchanges between teachers, students and other school stakeholders. I found that the NCLB mandates and sanctions were perceived by teachers as unfair, at odds with the goals of reform and potentially detrimental to some of the gains won through implementing CSR, such as social capital.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and many changes were made to offer more flexibility for English language learners (ELLs). Historically, teachers have not been well informed of the changes made to the specific requirements of educational policy despite being at the frontline to implement these changes in their classrooms. This mixed methods study includes the development of a comprehensive online survey to investigate how aware Indiana teachers are of the ESSA specific requirements for ELLs and the results of the survey completed by 46 teachers. For the analysis of the survey data, both statistical analysis and visual analytics were employed. Findings suggest that the teachers were not highly informed of the specific requirements of ESSA for ELLs, as well as were not adequately prepared to teach and assess ELLs under ESSA. Accordingly, very few teachers reported that they have made changes to their classroom instruction and assessment practices that would be beneficial for ELLs under ESSA. This study reiterates that the effectiveness of federal educational policy should be examined at the classroom level and suggests that the first step should be to clearly inform the classroom teachers by offering district level professional development, which includes a summary of the changes resulting from NCLB to ESSA. The study further highlights that without informing Indiana teachers of the changes made in federal educational policies, the shift from NCLB to ESSA will be nothing more than a renaming of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Hence, the study underlines that only when these changes are implemented at the classroom level through teachers, all students, including ELLs, will benefit from these new policy changes under ESSA.

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