Three-quarters of students want more information about where their fees go. They have been promised this information for many years but it has been slow to arrive in accessible forms. Now the Office for Students, which has a statutory duty to ensure students receive value for money, is making it happen. This is in the interests of taxpayers and…

During the past decade, states and districts have made significant investments in developing systems to measure teacher performance. The goals of such systems are to improve practice, inform professional growth, and ultimately improve student learning. In the very best of these systems, educators know the expected teaching standards and receive…

We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education--what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve? In "Educational Goods," two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin…

The changes in the economy and society in this century have placed a greater emphasis on the skills that citizens need to be successful. This diverse set of skills, often referred to as 21st century skills, and including critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, communication, and socio-emotional skills, among others, are in high demand as…

This study explored school district adoption and implementation of a learning management system. A substantial body of literature exists on school district data systems. However, this literature is highly rational in its view of data system adoption, and contains limited studies on learning management systems. With these liabilities in mind, this…

Student-Based Budgeting (SBB)--also called weighted student funding, fair student funding, student-based allocations, or student-centered funding--is a school funding system where schools receive dollars based on the number of enrolled students and their individual needs (such as English language learners, or students from high-poverty…

When Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers football team, "took a knee" during the playing of the National Anthem, he outlined his rationale for protest: "this country stands for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. And it's not happening for all right now." He also spoke specifically about police…

Developing collaborative research teams to obtain external funding has been strongly encouraged by national policies in recent years. Therefore, Chinese academics have been eager to participate in such collaborative research teams. Using qualitative methods, we conducted in-depth interviews with 18 academics who worked at first-, second- and…

To determine factors that influence faculty engagement and success in faculty learning communities focused on collaborative Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), our project gathered information on (1) faculty motivation to engage with SoTL; (2) structures that support collaboration; (3) the perceived impact of SoTL on teaching,…

This article reports on a study that investigated how collaborative leadership can influence sustained learner academic performance in secondary schools. The key problem resounds about secondary schools that are unable either to sustain or improve learner academic performance when intervention strategies rolled out from the district offices are…

Serious damage to teacher professionalism is being triggered by the current performance dominated culture caused by neoliberal global conditions (performativity) in Australian schools. Many teachers are feeling severely compromised in their ability to offer quality teaching to their students. It is imperative that education policy makers and…

This paper returns to a long-standing theme in education research, the ways in which 'contextual factors impact on what schools do, as well as directly on what pupils achieve' (Lupton, 2004, 4). Drawing on a project designed to explore the early effects of reforms to national examinations, the curriculum for 14-16 year olds and school…

The Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center used a rigorous 2-year collaborative process to develop, test, and revise a conceptual framework for high-quality state early intervention (EI) and early childhood special education (ECSE) systems. The framework identifies six critical components of a state system and what constitutes quality in each…

The purpose of this study is to examine ways in which school principals conduct observations of the practice of teaching Turkish and math in lower secondary (middle school, ages 10-14) in Turkey. Using a multicase qualitative research method, this study focuses on 12 secondary school teachers and six principals as they engage in observational…

This paper introduces the concept of 'soft privatisation'. Departing from a review of the literature examining the growing participation of private sector actors in the provision of public education across Europe, the paper investigates how privatisation has emerged in the context of the European Union as a phenomenon embedded in, rather than a…