Background/context: In recent years, opposition to accountability policies and associated testing has manifested in widespread boycotts of annual tests--mobilized as the "opt-out movement." A central challenge facing any movement is the need to recruit and mobilize participants. Key to this process is framing--a discursive tactic in…

In this post-truth era, public education--and education more generally--appears to be under attack. In the US, the numbers who forsake a public education for either home schooling, or for for-profit or charter schools, are increasing. Public schools are closing with more rapidity, especially in the urban areas of the US. Conservative legislators…

This article aims to understand how new accountability instruments in the context of the French-speaking Belgian educational system are appropriated by schools. After having characterised the specific nature of those instruments in the context of a traditionally highly decentralised system involved in a significant process of centralisation, we…

Last spring's sudden shift to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted K-12 education in an unprecedented way. Upon Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's waiver of federally mandated state testing for spring 2020, it also triggered the first nationwide break in state testing in half a century. With students returning to school…

Legislation leading to the mandating of accountability testing in schools was chronicled between the publication of "A Nation at Risk" (1983) to the conclusion of No Child Left Behind (2016). Involvement in education by the federal government increased throughout the educational legislation during this time period. The Omnibus Trade and…

What does it mean to hold schools accountable? How do we measure school performance? Why do we care? We convened focus groups of K-12 stakeholders to wrestle with these tough questions and help us better understand the current accountability landscape--where we've been as well as where we're headed. We've compiled what those focus group…

Neoliberal discourses defining and measuring "student achievement" and "teacher success" through myopic high-stakes testing-driven criteria for "accountability," can perpetuate the very inequities these reforms purport to address. Nested within a five-year inquiry using grounded theory to investigate experiences of…

Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane have gathered a diverse group of scholars to examine the shifting federal role in education across the presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. While the administrations were vastly different, one thing remained constant: an ongoing and significant expansion of the federal role in…

This article considers the politics of adoption of a testing regime in South Africa. While the broad features of this regime are similar to those in developed countries, there are features specific to the South African context. These emerge from a combination of external and internal pressures. External pressures derive from international testing…

Education has been powerfully affected by the rise of a neoliberal political, economic and cultural agenda. The Australian experience since the 1980s is outlined. Educators need to understand neoliberalism, and also to think about the nature of education itself, as a social process of nurturing capacities for practice. Education itself cannot be…

April 2015 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the landmark legislation that has provided the foundation of federal education policy in the United States. In "Presidents, Congress, and the Public Schools," longtime policy analyst Jack Jennings examines the evolution of federal education…

Bernard Barker's thesis that schools have been undermined over the past quarter of a century by a damaging combination of top-down, centralised reform and a desire to impose a market philosophy on education is powerful. This article analyses the nature of the apparatus of control--both statist and free-market--which has been applied to schools…

Can a teachers' union successfully be both a hardball-playing defender of its rights and a collaborative force for the common good? It is both a question of philosophy and, increasingly, one of policy direction for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), whose biennial convention in Detroit showed delegates grappling with the tension between…

Receiving, accommodation and education of children with immigrant background is one of the challenging issues in almost all the metropolitan areas in many countries. In our study we are exploring the impact of demographic changes on political agendas, legal frames, educational approaches, research findings and student achievement in the field of…

Developments in school education in Australia over the past decade have witnessed the rise of national efforts to reform curriculum, assessment and reporting. Constitutionally the power to decide on curriculum matters still resides with the States. Higher stakes in assessment, brought about by national testing and international comparative…