This article describes a new paradigm for accountability that envisions afterschool programs as learning organizations continually engaged in improving quality. Nearly 20 years into the era of results-based accountability, a new generation of afterschool accountability systems is emerging. Rather than aiming to test whether programs have produced…

Within the context of bilateral support to the education sector in Tonga and the Solomon Islands, this paper will explore how the discourse of "partnership" has been interpreted and activated within the Sector wide approach (SWAp). In concentrating particularly on the relationship between the respective Ministries of Education and New…

The purpose of this study is to explore the applicability of Collins' (2001) "Good-to-Great" theory, as originally introduced for the business sector and as adapted for the social sector, to the ways a community college moved from being "good" to being "great." The following questions guided the research: (1) Which of Collins' themes, if any, were…

The authors of this monograph assert that by assisting school systems to more closely resemble "high reliability" organizations (HROs) that already exist in other industries and benchmarking against top-performing education systems from around the globe, America's school systems can transform themselves from compliance-driven…

Although priding itself on high rates of literacy achievement, New Zealand's track record in the last two decades has noticeably declined. Successive New Zealand governments have invested heavily in trying to redress this decline with limited success. Demographic changes in population due to immigration provide a partial explanation, but arguably,…

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is the most prominent contemporary effort to professionalize teaching. Along with identifying exceptional teachers, the NBPTS seeks to alter teachers' work by establishing a cadre of expert teachers capable of and obligated to leading school improvement efforts. This article reports…

The purpose of this study was to understand the role of non-formal education and training in the organizational change process of Civil society organizations (CSOs) in post war Liberia. CSOs are the local foundation for democracy and development in Liberia, and serve a wide range of roles in local communities. For example, in post-war Liberia,…

Todos Juntos New Mexico was a collaborative made possible through a multimillion dollar grant awarded by the Fellows Foundation to empower the community, students, and educators in New Mexico to affect positive change in our public educational system, leading to increased student success, not just for Hispanics, but for all students. Of particular…

Higher education in the United States has received much scrutiny in the recent past from the federal and state governments, the press and the general public. In response to this scrutiny, a number of blue ribbon panels have been formed to examine how effectively higher education is serving American society. In this article, I analyse the…

The annual meeting of the ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) IQA (internal quality assurance) Group gathered some 60 participants in the premises of the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) in The Hague in June 2009. This seminar was a successful follow-up to the first ENQA IQA…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging literatures on organizational learning and strategic management by developing a practice perspective on strategic organizational learning (SOL). While the literature on SOL has been growing, much of it has targeted exclusively practitioners and has not yet elaborated the mechanics and…

Many of the first-wave reform initiatives of the 1980s have been successfully implemented on a widespread basis and are having an important influence on the schooling process. The reform movement was expected to fail because of strong financial, political, and organizational arguments. Reform initiatives were said to be insufficiently funded,…

This article seeks to explore the "fit" of "the network" as an organizational form being implemented in schools in England. It considers current trends within education policy, pedagogy and educational technology in the context of these new service delivery models and relates these to the current interest in learning networks.…

Hospitals--the most costly segment of the health care system--are beginning to use benchmarking to discover how other hospitals and businesses have developed cost-cutting and time-saving ways of doing things. Benchmarking is a sophisticated, multifaceted procedure, usually conducted by teams, for identifying and adapting best-in-class practices.…

Leaders of many reform and restructuring efforts in schools and in teacher education ignore or avoid serious self-study by not looking critically at themselves, their work, the assumptions from which they operate, and the successes and failures of their efforts. Nearly all school-university reform efforts exhibit weaknesses that can be tied…