No Child Left Behind and the Assault on Teachers' Professional Practices and Identities

“This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol 25 number 8, Author: Brian D. Barrett, "No Child Left Behind and the Assault on Teachers' Professional Practices and Identities", Pages 1018-1025, Copyright Elsevier (November 2009)”.

This Bernsteinian analysis conceptualizes No Child Left Behind legislation in the United States as a recent and deliberate shift towards a “performance” model of official pedagogic discourse. The paper posits that this shift carries the capacity to fundamentally alter teachers' professional practices and identities.

It examines particularly whether the policy shift has impacted the professional practices and identities of pre-service and early career teachers, whose training has been completed in the wake of No Child Left Behind, differently than it has impacted the professional practices and identities of their veteran counterparts.