This paper aims to identify and compare key factors influencing US States' or an OECD country's decision to employ student test scores or test score value-added (VAM) in evaluating teacher effectiveness. Analysis using multiple linear probability model and logistic regression frameworks indicates that the use of VAM/student test scores was…

Despite a growing emphasis in education policy on 'what works for whom and in what circumstances', there is still considerable attention to decontextualised 'best practices' that emerge from cross-country comparisons of student achievement. Also, while operational and even political aspects of context are increasingly incorporated into policy…

Teachers are the most important resource in today's schools. In every country, teachers' salaries and training represent the greatest share of expenditure in education. And this investment in teachers can have significant returns: research shows that being taught by the best teachers can make a real difference in the learning and life outcomes of…

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…

Recent governments in Ecuador (2007-17) have achieved impressive improvements in education. Enrollments increased significantly, and Ecuador's learning gains on regional tests from 2006 to 2013 were among the largest in the region. Ecuador's recent PISA performance provides further confirmation of genuine progress in raising student learning. A…

Classrooms have become increasingly diverse places where students from various backgrounds share their learning experiences. To promote inclusive school settings for all, building teacher capacity for inclusive teaching represents a key policy area. Education systems need to ensure that teachers are adequately prepared for inclusive teaching and…

This report uses the most recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data, primarily from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 and Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 cycles, and seeks to evaluate the Ibero-American, countries where Spanish or Portuguese are the predominant…

A post-structural approach to exploring identity is taken in this paper in that identity is considered here as being socially constructed through discourse, which has deep implications for the shaping of subjectivity and practice. Given both the potential academisation and Anglicisation of Irish schools, and the additional re-drawing of what…

Quantitative measures of student performance are increasingly used as proxies of educational quality and teacher ability. Such assessments assume that the quality of educational practices can be unambiguously quantitatively measured and that such measures are sufficiently precise and robust to be aggregated into policy-relevant rankings like…

The last two decades have seen fast-moving and wholescale changes in the ways that education is now provided in French schools, in the nature of learner assessment, and in the form and scale of system evaluation. Innovation and reform have in part followed international trends, themselves triggered by the global impact of the international…

Current debates about test-based accountability policies revolve around questions of how to ensure that all students have access to high-quality schools and teachers. Whether and how one can meet this goal depend, in part, on the nature of the arguments that policy proponents and opponents mobilize in these debates. This article examines these…

This study gathers evidence on policies that aim to raise students' learning outcomes through incentives and support measures to enhance teacher quality. A central concern is to identify policies that are effective and efficient. These include incentives and support systems to ensure that high-quality candidates are recruited to initial teacher…

This study aims to examine to what extent the field of competence regarding curriculum knowledge is concordant with the other sub-competency fields of teaching. These fields are field knowledge, pedagogic competence in field teaching, use of information and communication technologies in teaching, student behaviours and class management,…

In the twenty-first century, the use of standardized tests as the primary means to evaluate schools and teachers in the United States has contributed to severe dilemmas, including misleading information on what students know, lower-level instruction, cheating, less collaboration, unfair treatment of teachers, and biased teaching. This article…

This article, an extract from the author's book "Head on the Block," describes how the purpose of the school examination system has changed such that now it is to evaluate the performance of teachers rather than the performance of their students. It highlights some of the negative effects of school league tables--in particular, how the…