The American experiment with charter schools advanced on dual impulses of increasing opportunities for disadvantaged students and unleashing market competition. While critics see these independently managed schools as a form of privatisation, proponents contend that they are public schools because of funding and accountability arrangements and…

This paper focuses on Stephen Ball's article, "The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity", since it is here that he analyses the issue of how neoliberal education policies shape teacher identities that I also wish to explore. I begin by providing a summary of the 2003 piece, noting how it locates teachers and their…

Concerns about the professional development of teachers have a political dimension as governments around the world engage in the discourse on global standards and want to improve the quality of their school education. Increasingly, teachers are feeling the pressure of securing high achievement scores and large-scale assessments of student learning…

Henry A. Giroux claims this to be the "worst of times" for US public education. Not alone in this judgment, numerous other scholars stand in agreement with him. These thinkers view the current corporate/accountability/testing movement, with its iron grip on public school policies, as disfiguring and disparaging the US system of public…

Since the first charter school opened 20 years ago in Minnesota, charters have been a focus of school reform advocates and the subject of substantial research. Yet the regulators of the charter industry (called "authorizers" or "sponsors") remain a mystery to many. In fact, many authorizers work in isolation, developing their…

Some consultees resist implementing, or implementing with integrity, effective academic or behavioral interventions that their consultants believe are needed to resolve specific student problems. In order to address consultee resistance, it is recommended that consultants complete functional assessments to determine the underlying reasons for the…

Education is overloaded with programs and data. The growth of digital power has aided and abetted the spread of accountability-driven data--Adequate Yearly Progress, test results for every child in every grade, Common Core standards, formative and summative assessments. Technology accelerates the onslaught of data. All this information goes for…

English language learners (ELLs) face a challenging academic future in learning a new language while simultaneously mastering content in the language they may be struggling to learn. Assessment plays an extremely important role in the academic careers of ELL students, perhaps more so than for native speakers of English. Major changes and…

The author argues that while outcomes assessment may be an imperfect process, if completed in a systematic and deliberative manner, it can help determine the overall direction, culture, and success of an academic department. Most important, assessment can spark meaningful pedagogical and curricular discussions that can lead to substantive academic…

Enactment of federal educational policy has direct implications for states and local school districts across the nation, particularly in the areas of accountability and funding. This study utilized constructivist grounded theory to examine the impact of policy on science education reform in a large, urban school district over a 5-year period. The…

Dialogue, as a communication form characterized by its commitment to inclusiveness and rationality, has long been advocated by educators as a mechanism for helping students become better thinkers. Unfortunately, numerous claims about the educational potential of participating in dialogue have not resulted in substantial changes in classroom…

In "The Case for Participatory Evaluation in an Era of Accountability" (this issue), Jill Chouinard highlights seven tensions between the participatory and technocratic approaches to evaluation. She suggests that there is a need to create opportunities for more participatory approaches to evaluation. In this essay, I suggest that the era of…

More and more nations are losing the ability to control their education systems. OECD is an important premise provider for educational policymaking championing a neoliberal agenda. With the aim to investigate the impact the OECD may have on national policymaking, this paper compares their recent teacher education policies with those of Norway. The…

Although people's outlook on the future tends to be characterized by hope and optimism, over time this outlook often becomes more dire. We review multiple theoretical accounts of this tendency to "sober up" as feedback about outcomes draws near, and we explicate factors critical to promoting these temporal declines in expectations. We then…

In this investigation, we analyzed student enrollment data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board accountability website for all Texas community colleges from 2000 through 2011. The numbers and percentages of community college students who were developmental education students were calculated and analyzed to determine changes over…