Meeting students’ basic needs – including ensuring they have access to nutritious meals and a sense of belonging and connection to school – can positively influence students’ academic performance. Recognizing this connection, schools provide resources in the form of school meals programs, school nurses, and school guidance counselors. However, these resources are not always available to students and are not always prioritized in school reform policies, which tend to focus more narrowly on academic learning. This book is about the balancing act that schools and their teachers undertake to respond to the social, emotional, and material needs of their students in the context of standardized testing and accountability policies. Drawing on conversations with teachers and classroom observations in two elementary schools, How Schools Meet Students’ Needs explores the factors that both enable and constrain teachers in their efforts to meet students’ needs and the consequences of how schools organize this work on teachers’ labor and students’ learning.
 

Introduction 
Part I The Work of Teaching
1 Beyond Standardized Testing: Meeting Students’ Social, Emotional, and Material Needs 
Part II Oak Grove Elementary
2 Working in an Audit Culture: Surveillance and Teaching at Oak Grove Elementary 
3 “This is the Most Dreadful Test”: The Hidden Curriculum of Standardized Testing 
Part III City Charter School
4 Working as Part of a School Reform Movement: Urgency, Achievement Gaps, and Individual Responsibility 
5 “I Would Love to Hear What You Have to Say”: Cultural Reproduction in Social and Emotional Learning 
Conclusion 
Appendix 
Acknowledgments
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index