ABSTRACT
When a new education policy is imposed from above it often takes control of whatever aspects of schooling it targets as well as the language and concepts connected to those aspects of schooling. For example, when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was instituted, terms such as “highly qualified” (i.e., “highly qualified teacher”) and “scientific” (i.e., “scientifically based research”) quickly came to mean, at least within the boundaries of NCLB, what the authors of the policy wanted them to mean. A teacher was qualified to teach a particular subject in accordance with the definition in the policy, and other definitions related to teacher qualifications, as well as various levels of teacher qualifications, were, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.
