In Michigan, schools and educators are held accountable for performance more than ever before. Charter school authorizers--the entities responsible for opening and overseeing new and existing charter schools--face almost no accountability for their performance. In Michigan's current charter landscape, the enormous responsibility of authorizing has…

Current tendencies in educational research in Sweden are presented and compared to Australia. We here refer to; organization of research, research allocation, publication patterns, and assessments of research qualities. Different trajectories of educational research were identified, where Australian research was organized as a field of study,…

News media often publish comparative studies that report U.S. student performance in a global context. The school quality concern seems so simplistic that anyone who had compulsory education can chime into the discussion. In this article, the condition of U.S. education is further disentangled across the boundary of K-12 and higher education. Core…

News media often publish comparative studies that report U.S. student performance in a global context. The school quality concern seems so simplistic that anyone who had compulsory education can chime into the discussion. In this article, the condition of U.S. education is further disentangled across the boundary of K-12 and higher education. Core…

Through the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative, states and territories have collaborated in the development of a common core of standards in English Language Arts and mathematics for grades kindergarten through twelve that are now being adopted by states. Designed not only for the purpose of providing strong, shared expectations, the…

This descriptive work urges U.S. policymakers to consider the English system of school inspections as a way of expanding our understanding of student achievement. Such an innovation is timely, according to the report, because the No Child Left Behind legislation is coming up for reauthorization. Using data largely from the English Office for…

External music examiners play a significant role in assessing, verifying and maintaining musical standards. Educational output endorsed by external examiners serves to verify, modify and legitimise internal behaviour. This article examines some of the "inside practices" of external music examiners in the context of quality assurance. It…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of five alternative measures of service quality in the high education sector--service quality (SERVQUAL), importance-weighted SERVQUAL, service performance (SERVPERF), importance-weighted SERVPERF, and higher education performance (HEdPERF). Design/methodology/approach: Data were…

In recent years, Bahrain has taken serious actions to diversify its sources of income and solve major national problems such as unemployment. Through this process it discovered that one of the main factors for its economic problems was the quality of higher education on offer. This led to the creation of a national Quality Assurance Authority that…

Assessment practices that aim to promote both quality and equity may be compromised in a higher education market where students are consumers and grades the currency exchanged for measures of success. In such a climate, academics report feeling pressured to make course content and assessment less challenging in order to obtain positive student…

South Africa's external quality assurance agency, the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC), commenced its first cycle of institutional audits in 2004. During 2005, three public higher education institutions were audited, namely the University of Cape Town, the University of Stellenbosch and Rhodes University. The process of preparing for and…

The present paper argues that university quality assurance (QA) promotes a masculinist culture leading to systemic discrimination against female academics. The analysis relates to the question of what it is about academic life that results in persistent gender inequality. Based on an ethnographically informed comparative study, textual/discourse…

This article discusses the meanings of quality in the Humboldtian university ideal and in the Bologna process, especially related to issues of institutional autonomy, academic freedom and the integration of teaching and research. The article gives an overview of current practices associated with quality and quality assurance in Germany and Norway.…

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of more than 19,000 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in households and correctional institutions. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare the ways in which a range of quality frameworks have been validated and to identify a number of factors that have an impact on validation processes. Design/methodology/approach: Seven examples of published quality frameworks applicable to the field of e-learning are described and the methods used to validate…