Recent years have seen the spread of a litigation culture in the UK education sector, with members of the public increasingly seeking recourse to the law to appeal, complain, or achieve compensation. The increasing tendency of people to resort to litigation suggests that recourse to the law is seen as a more immediate form of taking education…

The precarity of professionals working in schools and colleges at a time of change has been strongly accented by the competitive markets that currently characterise education and the influence of its global reforms. In this article, I draw on empirical data from a project located in a sixth-form college to argue that the field of Further Education…

This article examines the influence of Stephen Ball's work through the eyes of two former teachers turned academics who met through a mutual interest in his paper, 'The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity'. We note our personal reactions to this particular paper and how Ball's body of work has and continues to influence our thinking,…

Rudy Ruiz and Faith Connolly propose a new accountability measure that captures the percentage of students in a school that have a teacher of a similar ethno-racial background. The measure would hold school districts accountable for the percentage of students who have a teacher who looks like them. Adding this measure would bring attention to…

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded in daily life--from employment and education to healthcare and public services--AI literacy is emerging as both a civic competency and a human right. Yet second language learners, particularly from immigrant and marginalized communities, are often excluded from systems not designed for linguistic…

Chapter 9A of the Norwegian Education Act obligates teachers to act upon any suspicion of deficits in the school environment. This cross-sectional study explores teachers' (n = 140) perceptions and motivations in terms of initiating cases according to 9A, considering both accountability and responsibility. Teachers' job satisfaction and…

The purpose of this pilot study was to examine relationships among aspects of undergraduate music majors' goal setting in applied lessons. Aspects examined included students' perceptions of the difficulty and importance of their chosen musical goals, their commitment to and perceived likelihood of achieving those goals, and the effects of a…

American colleges and universities are being scrutinized as never before. From rising tuition costs and allegations of plagiarism at the highest levels to concerns about low rates of completion and the state of free inquiry on campus, four-year colleges in the U.S. are under the microscope. Yet one crucial issue that is too rarely accorded the…

The Trump administration's push to scale back the federal role in education could mean more autonomy for states. But this increased decision-making power will also make state K-12 accountability more important than ever. States must ensure education funding is used effectively, especially for those students furthest from opportunity. While some…

Like many policymakers across the globe, Tennessee policymakers have adopted theoretically substantial teacher evaluation reforms since the early 2010s. Although research suggests that the introduction of redesigned systems has not affected teacher or student outcomes, on average, specific accountability- and developmental-oriented policy levers…

While high-accuracy machine learning (ML) models for predicting student learning performance have been widely explored, their deployment in real educational settings can lead to unintended harm if the predictions are biased. This study systematically examines the trade-offs between prediction accuracy and fairness in ML models trained on the…

In Virginia, a contentious school board meeting led to an arrest and trespassing summons. In Utah, eleven people were charged with disorderly conduct after a board meeting turned chaotic. Not long ago, school boards conducted mundane district business. Understudied and underreported, they were an afterthought of centrally driven education reform…

Some college students may be disengaged when completing assessments for institutional accountability and improvement. If disengagement is not identified and the resulting data are removed, the validity of score interpretations suffers. Using data gathered from students who completed non-consequential assessments for institutional accountability,…

State and federal policymakers "see" school performance via formal measures -- data collected with attendance sheets and standardized tests. Such an approach, though not without its merits, is extremely limited and inherently exposed to the threat of systematic misperception and unintended consequences, especially as policymakers try to…

Current conceptions of accountability imply that, in order for teachers to be able to hold themselves to account, they need first to have cultivated certain 'professional dispositions'. But these conceptions fail to acknowledge the extent to which teachers are first and foremost accountable 'as such'. For the early existentialist thought of the…