A number of states have made progress in implementing performance-based funding (PFB) and accountability. This policy brief summarizes main features of performance-based funding systems in three states: Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana. The brief also identifies key issues that states considering performance-based funding must address, as well as…

U.S. teachers grade homework far more than teachers in other countries, yet at least one study shows a negative correlation between grading homework and student achievement. More important, Vatterott notes, grading homework sends students unhelpful signals about the purpose and value of homework. By focusing on the grade, students view homework…

School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and "evidence-based" practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with…

Teacher professional standards and accountability are today writ large on the landscape of both schooling and teacher education practice around the world. This paper explores some of the related debates through a discussion of four discourses on teacher professional standards: namely, discourses of commonsense, professionalism and quality,…

American educators are expected to be partners in the rearing of our children, with crucial roles in children's intellectual and moral development both. We therefore must find thoughtfully balanced ways of assessing school performance and engineering school reform. In this essay, a high school principal reflects on recent accountability reforms in…

Distance education permeates the field of professional and continuing education to such an extent that quality assurance (QA) is a topic no distance educator or administrator should avoid. Quality assurance is an issue not just for continuing education but also for higher education generally. Given the disruptive impact of distance education and…

If, as the linguistic turn has taught us, there is no representational knowledge, but more agreements and/or struggles over how to talk and learn about what we call reality, we need to address and analyse the consequences of different vocabularies of educational phenomena and schooling, in order to better understand and make use of both the…

Thousands of educators, parent activists, and others are expected to convene in the heat and humidity of Washington next month for a march protesting the current thrust of education policy in the United States, especially the strong emphasis on test-based accountability. Organizers of the Washington say U.S. policymakers are moving in the wrong…

Purpose: This article describes a strategy for rural providers, communities, and policy makers to support or establish accountable care organizations (ACOs). Methods: ACOs represent a new health care delivery and provider payment system designed to improve clinical quality and control costs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)…

Hampton High School, located 10 miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, serves 1,100 students in grades 9-12. The school district has a strong academic tradition, and more than 90% of graduates continue their education. For four consecutive years, Hampton has been ranked among the top 6% of the nation's high schools by "Newsweek"…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

Assessing the potential impact and utility of course assignments are often a matter of informed, yet personal judgment. Here, in this article, doing our own assignments before assigning them to students is explored as a quality assurance measure and as a means to ensure an empathetic and critical approach to developing course work.

The purpose of this article is to provide leaders of continuing education enterprises with an integrated model for sustaining strategic planning initiatives. Global economic conditions, shifting competitive forces, continuing calls for accountability, and dramatic changes in institutional funding streams contribute to an environment characterized…

Whether schools have productive data-analysis sessions leading to instructional improvements and increased student learning or meetings that are a waste of time and resources could well hinge on the structures that are put in place by and the expectations of school and district leadership. Based on his work as a data coach with more than 200…

Recently, institutes of higher education (universities) have shown a renewed interest in organisational structures and operating methodologies that generate productivity and innovation; responsibility centre budgeting (RCB) is one such process. This paper describes the underlying principles constituting RCB, its origin and structural elements, and…