An organization's success centers on its leadership. Critical in the field of education, Houston (2001) proclaimed it best when he declared that superintendents have an opportunity to profoundly affect children's lives (Lashway, 2002b). Increasingly, empirical studies being conducted on leadership in education highlight the relationship between…

The purpose of the present study is to analyze stakeholder theory and its applicability to community college accountability. Community colleges have been using strategic planning as a management approach that includes the process of strategic action, and many organizations claim that they collaborate with their stakeholders during this process.…

Rigorous standards and aligned assessments are vital tools for boosting education outcomes but they have little traction without strong accountability systems that attach consequences to performance. In this pilot study, Eileen Reed, Janie Scull, Gerilyn Slicker, and Amber Winkler lay out the essential features of such accountability systems,…

The portfolio strategy is a performance management model for districts that aims to create dramatic student achievement gains at scale. It centers on creating more high-quality schools regardless of provider, giving schools autonomy over staff and funding, and holding all schools accountable for performance. This one-pager outlines the seven key…

This report presents statistical profiles for the Midwest Region states of school districts designated as "in improvement" for school year 2009/10 under accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and compares the prevalence and characteristics of these districts and those of districts not in improvement. It also…

From the Center on Reinventing Public Education's (CRPE's) work examining the efforts to close schools over the past 10 years, in cities of all sizes, two glaring facts stand out: Most city and district leaders are surprised at how difficult it is to close schools. And many of these leaders make mistakes that others before them have learned to…

Modern information technologies have transformed the meaning and promise of "open government." The term originally stood for the ideas of government transparency and public accountability. But with the rise of the Internet, "open government" has grown to encompass a wide range of civic goals--greater public participation and…

The Race to the Top Reform Support Network (RSN) designed this toolkit to help States and school districts implement student learning objectives (SLOs) with the highest degree of quality. The toolkit contains templates, guidance documents, sample SLOs and other tools, which States and school districts can select or adapt for their own purposes as…

Race to the Top States offer a wide range of supports for local educational agency (LEA) implementation of one of four school intervention models. Some States allocate resources on a regional basis, while others coordinate resources at the State level. Certain States also use data tools to measure district needs, capacity and progress on key…

Michigan's former governor, John Engler, was naturally attracted to charter schools. He had seen for too long how school districts treated students as their property and the state as an endless funding source, and he wanted that to change. Engler saw the chartering strategy as a politically viable means for gaining leverage over school districts…

This article explores the neo-institutional theory of global policy convergence, or "isomorphism", by comparatively examining one of its most recent manifestations--the global diffusion of national standardised testing--in Australia and Japan. By understanding the particular configurations of national testing as being conditioned by both…

Hearing the national call for higher education accountability, the author of this tripartite article urges university administrators to move towards a more data-driven approach to counseling center supervision. Toward that end, the author first examines a key factor--perceived increase in student pathology--that appears to shape budget and…

One of the main aims of the so-called common "European Higher Education Area" is the creation of a European framework for higher education (HE) qualifications and a network of "quality assurance agencies." In the light of the above processes, recent legislation in Greece on quality assurance in HE and the operation and…

The direction of the UK Government's policy is to remove schools from local authority control, and replace that relationship with private sponsors, undermining their ability, or indeed inclination, to deliver on the "Every Child Matters" agenda, among many others. The author argues that local authorities have much to give and where they…

Despite the growing number of culturally sensitive training models and considerable literature on the importance of training clinicians in larger contextual issues, research examining how students learn to apply these issues is limited. In this participatory action research project, we systematically studied our own process as marriage and family…