With feedback gathered from townhall meetings at the start of 2025, Kentucky's education leaders are revising the state's assessment and accountability framework to give districts more choice in how they assess student mastery of content and skills and to give their communities full rein to design local school accountability systems tied to their…

The surest measure of a successful college or university is the academic success of its students. True academic success requires incoming students to be academically prepared for college rigor, and is demonstrated by the availability of high-quality academic programs and evidence of personal and professional growth in the years after students'…

In their nascent stages, charter schools formed under competing ideologies. In academic circles, charter schools were envisioned as pedagogical laboratories that would allow for educator- and community-driven school improvement. In other circles, charter schools emerged as a free-market reform driven by accountability, choice, and growth. Amid the…

Public university governing boards exist to serve the people of their states. It should, therefore, be easy for the public to know what governing bodies are doing. University governance, however, isn't always as transparent as it should be. Often, the public is given little advance notice of when and where meetings will be held and what issues…

In recent years a suite of policies and practices that are strongly influenced by efforts to make the work of educators and education providers more accountable, have had a powerful impact across the sector in settings such as Australia. In part, this goes some way to explaining why many working in the teaching profession report being dissatisfied…

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ensuring culture wars, the American school choice coalition has almost completely unraveled, but many school choice advocates assert that the coalition can be rebuilt. In this essay, I argue that the school choice coalition dissolved not because of politics or circumstance, but because the…

As postsecondary grantmaking foundations make sense of recent sociopolitical crises, including inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic; attention to the Movement for Black Lives following the summer 2020 uprisings; and more openly racialized politics, they have been catalyzed to reconsider their racial equity commitments. Grantmakers are…

The aim of this paper is to increase transparency in the scientific analysis of equity gaps in education. This should be useful in avoiding common ambiguities and misunderstandings in the discourse and in presenting the analyses results in a constructive way. We focused on a very basic aspect of transparency: Information availability. We…

Shifts in the education system to more student-centered learning will require state and local education agencies to rethink how they do their work. Current accountability systems focus on compliance with standards, as demonstrated in annual summative assessments. Mark Elgart explains that a new approach to accountability will offer more authentic…

Since taking office, the Biden administration has sought to advance a complex and ambitious higher education regulatory agenda. The U.S. Department of Education held two separate rounds of negotiated rulemaking in 2021-22 to rewrite rules governing student loan relief programs and institutional accountability. This fall, the agency announced plans…

This essay offers a framework for broader community involvement as a means of increasing the relevance and usefulness of evidence developed. This essay begins by defining key concepts related to democratizing the development of evidence. The sections that follow outline a logic model that calls for a bidirectional, iterative set of core activities…

In this brief, we discuss embedding and framing the evolving literatures related to improvement and implementation sciences into a general intervention perspective. From that perspective, we sketch out some basic considerations related to improvement and implementation research, practice, and policy.

This article describes the use of a "Learning Commission" to experiment with conceptualising and implementing richer modes of educational accountability. A "Learning Commission" is a form for collaborative thinking that brings different kinds of knowledge and expertise to bear in relation to a common matter of concern: the role…

Improvement efforts in physical education have often targeted complex issues through a singular, unidimensional lens. This strategy is less effective given the interrelated and complex relationship among the physical education systems and its components. Systems planning dynamics are underrepresented in the literature, but considerations for the…

Grounded in the theories of inclusive talent management (TM) and social-exchange, this conceptual paper draws on the education working conditions and broader TM scholarship to promote Talent Centered Education Leadership, an education human resource management (HRM) approach that emphasizes an "employee centered" philosophy to enhance…