AbstractsEducation Research & Administration

AbstractNo Child Left Behind, hereafter referred to as NCLB, has given us an age of accountability for America's schools that includes high stakes tests for students at various grade levels. Those tests are used to measure a child's knowledge of standards in each core subject area including math, science, language arts, and social studies. The standards and tests that are used are developed by each state giving autonomy for the development of those standards, assessments, and accountability to be left as a local or state decision. The concept is that states have diversity that should be accounted for in education. Reformers in America today argue that states cannot be compared to each other regarding student achievement because of a lack of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and assessments. President Barack Obama introduced the concept of Common Core State Standards for all states through his education reform initiative known as Race to the Top (RTTT). Ohio received federal grant money from Race to the Top in order to establish the Common Core State Standards and assessments that will be utilized to determine accountability measures for each Ohio public school district. The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has chosen Ohio's system of educational service centers to provide teachers with professional development regarding implementation of those standards. The Mahoning County Educational Service Center (MCESC) has chosen the teacher-leader model to deliver the professional development to each school in the county. In the model, each district sends a teacher for each subject for elementary and secondary grades to a series of trainings on common core. Those teachers are then responsible for providing training back at their respective districts for all of the other teachers in their respective subject and grade levels. The purpose of this dissertation is to determine the effectiveness of the model on student achievement through analyzing research and student assessment data from every school in Mahoning County. The schools that participated in the professional development model will be used as the experimental group, whereas the schools that have not participated will be used as the control group. The dependent variable of student achievement scores will be used to determine any significant change in scores.