Student debt is still rising for bachelor's degree recipients. In 2013, seven in 10 (69%) graduating seniors at public and private nonprofit colleges had student loans. These borrowers owed an average of $28,400 in federal and private loans combined, up two percent compared to their peers in 2012. Debt at graduation varies greatly by state and by…

District and state data systems are constructed to ensure that individuals can access only the data that are appropriate for their role. Still, questions from the public about how these data systems work and how student privacy is protected have been increasing. A recurring concern is the feared existence of a "permanent record"--a…

With this new tool, ACTA [American Council of Trustees and Alumni] is working to expand its outreach to governors nationwide on behalf of higher education reform, focusing on key issues of quality, cost, and accountability. ACTA has worked with governors and education leaders from across the country, and that experience has proven that innovative…

Boston Public Schools is at a crossroads. Nearly one-third of the system's schools operate under one of several "autonomy" structures, where school leaders have increased flexibility regarding staffing and other resources, and choice data indicate parents are far more likely to prefer these schools over so-called "traditional"…

This guide provides state education agencies (SEAs) and districts (LEAs) with guidance about how to assess the district's readiness to support school turnaround initiatives. Often, school turnaround efforts focus only on the school's structure and leadership. Rarely do policymakers or practitioners think about school turnaround as a system-level…

School boards are very powerful entities whose decisions have a significant impact on millions of students in the United States. Since the formation of the first local school boards in Massachusetts in the late 1700s, these groups of local officials have directed public education in their communities (Land, 2000). Throughout the nineteenth…

Young people across California are leading the way forward socially, culturally, and politically. They are organizing for racial justice, learning and working and caring for family members during a pandemic, and voting in record numbers. The past two years with the COVID-19 pandemic has been hardest on kids, particularly children of color, in…

In the four-plus years since the author retired, he has spoken about teaching and learning (T & L) at more than 65 further education colleges, sixth form colleges and conferences. Looking back over these occasions and the emails that he has received from tutors, the author realises that there is one topic more than any other that preoccupies…

To be successful in the age of accountability, principals and all school leaders need to continue to build their capacity to lead meaningful, systemic and sustainable student improvement efforts that incorporate the required areas of reading and mathematics. A review of the educational literature revealed several studies that identified the…

In September 2011, the Obama Administration initiated a program to grant states waivers of several significant requirements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This initiative grew out of a concern that "in its implementation, No Child Left Behind had some serious flaws that…

This study examines Qatar's recent and ambitious school reform in the early stages of its implementation against a set of four criteria for successful education systems drawn from guidelines developed by the international community: adequacy, accountability, autonomy and gender equity. We investigate both the initial structure of the reform and…

Declining trust in public services has led to increasing calls for higher education to be "accountable" for the quality of its teaching and learning provision. However, increasing levels of quality evaluation have led academics to feel that their professionalism is under attack. Reflecting on this history and various dimensions of…

This article examines the government's view, as revealed in its June 2012 National Curriculum proposals, of the purposes and character of the primary curriculum as a whole. The proposals are found to be deficient in a number of respects: in their naive, selective and inflated use of international evidence; in their treatment of aims as no more…

A new entry in the testing lexicon is through-course summative assessment, a system consisting of components administered periodically during the academic year. As defined in the Race to the Top program, these assessments are intended to yield a yearly summative score for accountability purposes. They must provide for both individual and group…

We argue that the concept of a "policy prolepsis" is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes educational practices within spaces of desired policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses represent a range of emergent policy ontologies produced through the interface of educational actors' senses of policy and their estimations of…