Educational accountability has come to be defined almost exclusively in terms of schools meeting external standards of improvement. Building on a body of scholarship that presents schools as complex organizations, this research proposes that a more robust understanding of educational accountability must be grounded in practitioners perceptions of…

Thousands of schools across the country are chronically low performing, and they operate within districts and states that are struggling to help them improve. The School Improvement Grants (SIG) program is designed to channel federal funds to states and districts facing the task of turning around struggling schools. SIG, a part of the Elementary…

This article presents the author's critiques on Jim Garrison's essay and focuses on Garrison's concerns about the affronts posed to democracy by the standardization and accountability regimes in education. He rightfully highlights a few critical ways by which standardization and accountability in education reflect and reinforce antidemocratic…

Schools, districts, and state-level educational organizations are experiencing a great shift in the way they do the business of education. This shift focuses on accountability, specifically through the expectation of the effective utilization of evaluative-focused efforts to guide and support decisions about educational program implementation. In…

In September 2011, the author published "School Wars: the battle for Britain's education." Since then she has been travelling around the country engaging in intense debates with parents, teachers, politicians and students about the current state of state education. It has been an interesting experience for it has brought her, a…

A key assumption in efforts to implement and improve cross-government public reporting systems is that legislators will make use of the performance information to enhance accountability and improve program and policy effectiveness. This five-year study is an assessment of expectations and actual uses of annual performance reports by elected…

For almost three decades of teaching English and writing, the author has learned that despite years of reading and writing instruction and experiences in school, many, if not most, students have misguided, incomplete, or jumbled perceptions of genre, medium, and text. Two dynamics--traditional transmissional approaches to text as well as…

Thousands--if not tens of thousands--of books, monographs, and articles have been written on the subject of leadership. A Google search of the word returns nearly a half-billion Web sites. As a professional who has spent nearly 40 years in the higher education sector, the author has been blessed with opportunities to view and practice leadership…

This paper explores the epistemic dimension of neoliberalism in the context of higher education. Much critical commentary depicts neoliberalism negatively in terms of knowledge commodification, marketisation, productivity agendas, accountability regimes, bureaucratisation, economic rationalism and micro-managerialism. The paper offers a conceptual…

Sabbaticals have been identified as an important tool to help faculty remain current in their responsibilities. By having a dedicated break from traditional responsibilities, faculty members have self-reported rejuvenation and recommitment to their professional work. Institutional policies, however, are largely vague and lack measures to help…

In scientific and academic circles, the value of Google Scholar as an information resource has received much scrutiny. Numerous articles have examined its search ability, but few have asked whether it has the accuracy, authority and currency to be trustworthy enough for scholars. This article takes a look at reliability factors that go into Google…

The current higher education landscape is replete with demands for improving accountability, increasing efficiency, and controlling costs. At the same time, information technologies make it easier to collect and analyze information to measure outcomes or to assist in decision making. Consequently, there is a higher demand for better information…

This qualitative case study used Wenger's (1998) communities of practice (CoP) framework to analyze how the ongoing electronic learning community (eLC) process at an established state virtual high school (SVHS) supported online teachers in building relationships with online students. Lave and Wenger's (1991) concept of legitimate peripheral…

The opposing principles of local control and increased standardization are a prominent tension in the United States' education system. Since at least the early 1990s, this tension has taken shape around the accountability movement, defined by educational reforms that hold schools, teachers, and students accountable for performance on new…

The last two decades have seen unprecedented interest in science curricula, with many governments seeing improvements in the performance of their school students in science as key to future economic prosperity. We present the results of an analysis of the curriculum documents for primary and secondary science in Australia (New South Wales and…