In the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector there is a move to reduce oversight costs by reducing the frequency of quality assessments in providers who score highly consistently across time. However, virtually nothing is known about the stability of ECEC quality assessments over time. Using a validated measure of overall classroom…

In education systems across the world, teachers are under increasing quality assurance scrutiny in relation to the provision of feedback comments to students. This is particularly pertinent in higher education, where accountability arising from student dissatisfaction with feedback causes concern for institutions. Through semi-structured…

The author of this article describes an intermediate economics course structured around outside readings, which include academic journal papers, policy briefs, and news articles. Students complete low-stakes, high-frequency writing assignments that promote accountability and encourage critical thinking about the readings. This pairing of outside…

Reviewing institutional governance arrangements through a European lens has the benefit of broadening the argument away from differences between pre-1992 and post-1992 constitutions or between research-intensive and teaching-led university perspectives. In the last two decades in Europe is a massive increase in student numbers and institutional…

The authors theorize what we call managerialist subterfuge, drawing on distinct ethnographic studies to examine how adult "partners" leverage the language and strategies of corporate managerialism to undermine youths' radical visions of change. Critical analysis of patterns in interview and participant observation data across two youth…

Educational policy in the UK and beyond increasingly focuses on promoting skills that encourage learners to be independent thinkers and to self-manage their own learning. While the educational benefits of metacognition (i.e., thinking about and managing one's own thinking) are widely acknowledged, little attention has been paid to teachers'…

This article asks the question of what documentation is doing, rather than what documentation means in the context of early childhood education. By focusing on the documentation of a young child's playful exploration with water that inhabits a classroom wall, new materialist theories are put to work to ponder documentation's agentive capacities…

This article reports an unprecedented exploratory small-scale investigation of the views of senior school leaders in southwest England relating to 'off-rolling' (illegal exclusionary practices). 'Off-rolling' is conceptualised as a policy technology, however, the conceptual framework used in data analysis derives from Foucault's treatment of power…

This study investigated test-taking engagement on the Spring 2019 administration of a large-scale state summative assessment. Through the identification of rapid-guessing behavior -- which is a validated indicator of disengagement -- the percentage of Grade 8 test events with meaningful amounts of rapid guessing was 5.5% in mathematics, 6.7% in…

At the core of New Public Management (NPM) reforms sits the concept of accountability of publicly funded organizations. In Canada, it is suggested that provinces have increased the number of accountability procedures imposed on universities and that those measures would have had an impact on professors' academic workload. This study discusses the…

This study aims to compare the school inspection reports prepared by educational inspectors in Turkey and the United Kingdom. In Turkey, educational inspection is carried out by the Educational Inspectors of the Ministry of National Education. On the other hand, educational inspection in the UK is carried out by Ofsted education inspectors. In…

School performance measures are published annually in England to hold schools to account and to support parental school choice. This article reviews and evaluates the 'Progress 8' secondary school accountability system for state-funded schools. We assess the statistical strengths and weaknesses of Progress 8 relating to: choice of pupil outcome…

In this article we address the mounting criticism and rejection of standardized tests used in the selection of students for college or university education. Admission tests are being increasingly demonized in many parts of the world and many colleges and universities are dropping tests for selection purposes, claiming the tests are detrimental to…

In 2015, a new performance-related pay scheme was introduced for schoolteachers in Italy as part of education accountability policies aimed at improving their performance. Beginning in that year, all Italian state school principals were offered the opportunity to distribute wage bonuses to deserving teachers. During the first year of…

In 2019, Drew H. Gitomer, Dan Battey, and José Felipe Martínez published a paper detailing apparent violations of fundamental principles and norms in the reporting of technical information about the edTPA, a widely used high-stakes assessment for teacher licensure. In this article, they describe and criticize the lack of appropriate response to…