Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Assessment is vital to the educational process as it enhances teaching and learning, promotes accountability, motivates students, guides instructional decisions, and drives systemic improvements. Assessment plays a crucial role in the educational process as it serves…

Student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change. Or said differently when placed in the context of governing, patterns of behavior that are exhibited in the boardroom can reasonably be expected to be found paralleled in the classroom. This concept, which offers a summation of the current literature on board behaviors and their…

This multiple case study explored the professional identities of teachers at the intersection of mathematics and language learning. Situated within a neoliberal schooling context, teachers were required to adapt standardized instructional goals and practices to support the cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds of new-arrival refugee and…

We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education--what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve? In "Educational Goods," two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin…

This study argues that teachers are disempowered and demoralised moral agents. Specifically, it uses a qualitative study of Hong Kong teachers to show that teachers' agency in the pursuit of the moral goal of education is socially disempowered. The study shows that although teachers are committed to the moral goal of education, the obstacles to…

In 2002, the author published three models for categorizing human rights education practice in the formal and non-formal education sectors: Values and Awareness, Accountability and Transformation, which are widely cited in the HRE literature. The original models were developed by applying grounded theory from a practitioner's point of view about…

Teaching and teachers have recently become the centre of attention of policy makers and researchers. The general idea here is that teaching matters. Yet the question that is either not asked or is only answered implicitly is why teaching matters. In this article I engage with this question in the context of a wider discussion about the role,…

The purpose of "A Better Future for our Schools" is to contribute to the debate about what a new government after 2015 should seek to achieve. It identifies 10 areas where current policies are clearly inadequate and damaging and identifies a range of actions to address each area. The manifesto is the outcome of debates organised by the…

This study reports teacher candidate beliefs about the purposes of schooling and their reasons for choosing a career in teaching. The beliefs are analyzed in relation to the moral work of teaching, and the findings suggest that teacher candidates choose teaching as a career, in part, to engage in moral work, and that they believe that schooling…

This paper presents the research design, rationale, and the results of a historical document-based research project to answer the following two-part question: How do popular and dominant political, social, and economic forces affect the creation and delivery of American history curriculum in public schools between 1890 and 1920 and how is this…

This study investigates the leadership strategies of successful principals. Previous research has indicated that principals who are successful engage in multiple practices to meet the needs of changing educational settings. For example, the "International Successful School Principal Project" (ISSPP) identified a core set of basic…

Public education has both political, or social, and personal, or self-improvement objectives; in addition it provides much of the moral quality of a democratic society. Each function--personal, political, and moral--has special significance for continuing education. Adults continue their education to update their job skills or to seek satisfaction…

Value assumptions in American higher education and the conflicts among them are surveyed. Questions are categorized as: economic versus noneconomic purposes of education, fairness and equality versus efficiency and quality, and the problems of authority and control in academic decision making. (Author/MLW)

Given the nature of the educational enterprise and of the advocated approaches to the enhancement of accountability, those approaches will not only fail to achieve the ends they are designed to achieve, but will also result in severe damage to the capacity of the school to fulfill its societal functions. (Author)

Problems with the ideological framework of the idea of accountability are discussed in terms of how "technological consciousness" requires that all elements be considered as reducible to objective measurable performance criteria, and that nonmeasurables be considered as "not real." (JMF)