The evidence presented in "No Place for Kids" makes clear that heavy reliance on juvenile incarceration is a counterproductive public policy for combating youth crime. It is time to act on this information by abandoning the long-standing incarceration model and embracing a more constructive, humane, and cost-effective approach to youth…

The purpose of this paper is to help countries understand some of the "key principles and characteristics of an effective student assessment system". The focus is on assessment of student learning and achievement at the K-12 level. The paper extracts principles and guidelines from countries' experiences, professional testing standards,…

In 2009-10, 92% of WCPSS schools met Expected or High Growth as measured by the North Carolina ABCs program, a 3.5 percentage point increase from 2008-09. Fifty-four percent of the schools made High Growth and 38% made Expected Growth. All subgroups saw their percentages of students meeting growth increase to above 55% in 2009-10; with the…

Numerous studies have shown how elementary social studies instruction has been constrained or curtailed in states that do not test social studies as part of their mandated accountability system. South Carolina is a state that tests social studies as well as English, mathematics, and science in grades three through eight as part of its…

Last July, the Atlanta Public Schools became the poster district for teachers and principals behaving badly. State investigators found that, in 44 schools across the city, 178 teachers and administrators had systematically cheated on the state standardized tests taken by their students in 2009. The largest cheating scandal by far has cast a pall…

As school districts create systems to identify, monitor, and assess teacher effectiveness, they consider a variety of sources, including observations of teaching practices and analysis of student assessments. A new voice--student perceptions--has emerged as a valuable source of information. In many districts, leaders are collecting data from a…

Current neoliberal educational policies are impacting young children and their teachers in the United States in many ways. Young children and teachers find themselves in vulnerable positions within a framework of an imperialist education in the age of standardization. Part of the struggle is to open spaces of decolonization that include home…

Campus 2020: Thinking ahead is a policy in British Columbia (BC), Canada, that attempted to hold universities accountable to performance. Within, I demonstrate how this Canadian articulation of educational accountability intended to develop "governmentality constellations" to control the university and regulate its knowledge output. This…

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology that allows higher education institutions (HEIs) to promote, to evaluate and to report on sustainability. The ultimate goal of the afore-mentioned methodology is to help HEIs achieve sustainability. First, a model entitled Sustainability in Higher Education Institutions (SusHEI) that generally…

Effective teachers are critical to raising achievement and closing long-standing gaps among student subgroups. Research on this point has become absolutely clear: Students who have three or four strong teachers in a row will soar academically, regardless of racial or economic background, while those who have a sequence of weak teachers will fall…

Regardless of what one thinks of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the current national education legislation has demonstrated the power and potential of learning standards linked with systems of accountability to influence classroom experiences. Unfortunately, the changes promoted by the legislation have tied the professional hands and suppressed the…

This article takes its point of departure in the current tendency of education policy to become more and more evidence-based. The use of statistics and numbers seems to be a prerequisite for conducting a policy that is both efficient and effective. The kind of knowledge thus produced is regarded as factual and scientific. This article tries to get…

Pressure from the U.S. Department of Education has led some states to curb a testing exemption that applies only to the 1 percent of students with the most severe disabilities, but districts that have long used that flexibility to win some breathing room in their accountability systems are bristling. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act,…

The authors examine how the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiated between teachers' unions and districts is associated with schools' and districts' performance under accountability pressures in California. They find that CBA restrictiveness is associated with the increased likelihood that districts will be in Program Improvement (PI)…

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4-9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious…