In the 1990s, most US states adopted new forms of performance-based accountability, e.g., performance-based budgeting, funding, or reporting. This study analyzed changes in institutional performance following the adoption of these new accountability standards. We measured institutional performance by representative education and research…

This article assesses the status and practice of higher education quality assurance in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on degree-granting tertiary institutions. A main finding is that structured national-level quality assurance processes in African higher education are a very recent phenomenon and that most countries face major capacity constraints.…

Quality assurance has been integrated into the fabric of higher education in China, with the issue of quality in higher education--how to evaluate it and how to enhance it--now taking centre stage in Chinese higher education. In the past decade, the development of quality assurance in Chinese higher education has covered a broad spectrum of…

To enhance their competitive advantage in the marketplace, many business leaders develop market orientation strategies designed to increase customer engagement. These market orientation strategies include improvement in service delivery, relationship management, customer satisfaction, and quality control methods. There is a lack of understanding…

Members of the non-profit organization Education Resource Strategies (ERS) have worked for over a decade with leaders of urban school systems to help them organize talent, time and technology to support great schools at scale. One year into the Federal program they are noticing significant differences in district turnaround approaches, engagement…

Background: Schools are increasingly confronted with the challenges that information about school performance brings with it. It is common for schools' use of performance feedback to be limited. Equally, however, there are documented cases in which school performance feedback is meaningfully used. Purpose: This study looks at how Flemish primary…

Over the last two decades, considerable progress has been made in establishing and implementing robust, comparable quality assurance processes throughout much of the European higher education sector. However, concerns persist over degree portability and recognition as current systems are rooted in national contexts. In particular, specialised…

A critical step in the professionalization of the field of leadership education (Komives, 2011) and the evolution of leadership as a field of study (International Leadership Association [ILA], 2009) is the development of best practices, standards of practice, and guidelines for assessment of quality in program delivery and accomplishment of…

Efforts to support children in schools require addressing not only academic issues, but also out-of-school factors that can affect students' ability to succeed. This study examined academic achievement of students participating in City Connects, a student support intervention operating in high-poverty elementary schools. The sample included 7,948…

Notwithstanding criticisms and discussions on methodological grounds, much attention has been and still will be paid to university rankings for various reasons. The present paper uses published information of the 10 top-ranking universities of the world and demonstrates the problem of spurious precision. In view of the problem of measurement error…

In this report, the authors characterize the differences between those interviewed who "loved school" and "those who did not." For this comparison, they created two sets of comparison groups: (1) interviewees divided into upper and lower halves on one item, "I loved school"; and (2) the top and bottom quartiles on the…

This article focuses on the role of the state in the context of an increasing market orientation in Swedish education policy. It asks if and how a market orientation and privatisation can be reconciled with attempts to reestablish central output control. The controlling function of the state is emphasised in the form of efforts to inspect both…

Over the past three decades policymakers have been seeking new ways to secure improved performance from higher education institutions. One popular approach has been performance funding, which involves use of a formula to tie funding to institutional performance on specified indicators. This report reviews findings from studies on performance…

External quality audits are now being used in universities across the world to improve quality assurance, accountability for quality education and transparency of public funding of higher education. Some countries such as Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark have had external quality audits for more than a decade but there…

Greater accountability in public higher education systems is a fact of life in the current political climate. Increasingly, one form this accountability takes is performance funding, which arises from elected officials' need for assurance that taxpayer funds are not only being invested and used properly but are resulting in desired outcomes at…