This article examines the impact of federal, state, and local policies on the roles that elementary school teachers are asked to assume inside and outside the classroom. Through a detailed analysis of changes in teacher tasks over a 4-year period, the authors determined that role expectations increased, intensified, and expanded in four areas: instructional, institutional, collaborative, and learning. These changes had unanticipated, and often negative, consequences for teachers’ relationships with students, pedagogy, and sense of professional well-being. The authors use one policy directive, differentiated instruction, to illustrate the complexity of role demands currently made of teachers, and they draw implications for policy and research.

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Using activities as its analytic focus, this article compares the classroom cultures of two reading lessons taught by the same teacher. One was from a regular reading class and the other from a reading intervention class that was designed to help students pass the high-stakes state assessment. By developing fine-grained descriptions of classroom activities and participant roles, the article offers educators and policymakers a close look at the ways in which childcentered and test-centered classroom cultures are constructed and the different types of learning opportunities and relationships each provides. [literacy instruction, classroom culture, high-stakes tests]He sat down to take the test and tears were coming down his face and he looked up at me and he said-I was teaching third grade-and he said, "I thought I could read." And I thought, from that minute on, that's never going to happen to me again. My kids are all going to feel comfortable. No one is going to look at this test and start crying.

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Curriculum transformation was examined at seven higher education institutions in the USA that were developing`performance-based' teacher-education programmes. A heuristic was created to di erentiate the contemporary performance standards-based assessment movement from its historical predecessor, competency-or performancebased teacher education. This heuristic provides the basis for a comparative analysis of curriculum change at these seven institutions, focusing on four questions: (1) Do the standards and performance assessments convey an image of a teacher as a professional who is engaged in intellectual work that requires careful deliberation?(2) Do they re¯ect the complex, integrated nature of teaching knowledge? (3) Do they evoke an image of teaching that is learner-centred and context-dependent?; and (4) Do they call for shared responsibility for assessing the quality of teaching in authentic settings? The paper concludes with lessons and dilemmas for teacher educators and policy makers involved in performance-based reform e orts.In 1992, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), whose mission is to promote standards-based reform of teacher preparation and licensing in the USA, issued a set of core teaching standards. This action was part of a systemic reform to articulate and align high standards for teachers and students. Parallel to the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) for experienced teachers, the practical impact of INTASC was the development of performance assessments for beginning teachers. In a parallel movement a ecting institutions, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) embedded INTASC principles in its accreditation standards and expected teacher-education programmes to assess student performance according to these standards. Several US states are also requiring teacher-education institutions to be`performance-based', using either the INTASC or State-developed standards as guidelines for teacher-candidate assessment.This shift from course-based to performance standards-based teacher education (PSBTE) has gained general approval and endorsement from j. curriculum studies, 2002, vol. 34, no. 2, 201±225 Linda Valli is an associate professor in the

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