Jill Chouinard, in her article "The Case for Participatory Evaluation in an Era of Accountability" (this issue, p. 237), may be re-iterating what has often been claimed and arguably is infused already in much of our theory and practice: the value of participatory approaches in some, perhaps many situations. She summarizes these claims eloquently…

Facility managers have questions about sustainability. How do an organization's physical facilities--its built environment--and the management of them, influence the sustainability of the organization or institution as a whole? How important is Facility Management (FM) to the overall sustainability profile of an organization? Facility managers…

This paper provides insight into distributed leadership by contrasting the oppositional messages found in the literature, and by examining differences in the rhetoric and reality associated with its application. Specifically, the treatment of power and accountability within the distributed leadership theoretical framework is difficult to…

Recent advances in our thinking about thinking are brought to bear here in our thinking about school improvement. Some ways in which our thinking hobbles education and educational leadership include: a results bias, a quantification bias, attribution of causality, substitution and intensity matching, predispositions, a confirmation bias, premature…

Ohio's charter-closure law is touted as one of the toughest in the nation because it requires the automatic closure of charter schools that consistently fail to meet academic standards. Ohio's charter-closure law, which became effective in 2008 and was revised in 2011, calls for automatic closure of schools rated in Academic Emergency for at least…

Recent educational reforms in Norway include national tests and monitoring mechanisms to see if key outcomes are being achieved. At the same time, Norway has not established the follow-up mechanisms like high-stakes incentives and rewards that are characteristic of accountability policies in some other countries. As a consequence, one could argue…

In the United States, federal and state accountability policies put demands on educational agencies that often exceed their capacity. As a result, a variety of educational organizations are contracted to design and implement policy. Programs and services offered by these contractors are not only instrumental in the process of mediating and…

The current study aims to identify teacher and administrator views regarding primary school principals' accountability. The case study model, a qualitative research method, was adopted in the study using the holistic single-case design. The working group was composed of a total of 56 individuals, 42 teachers and 14 administrators (11 principals…

The need to train and engage all school counselors in use of data drives professional development at the district and state level. This study examined previous training in the use of data and the degree to which that training influenced current school counseling practices. Data were collected from 512 school counselors across a Midwestern state.…

This essay addresses the care of the self as an important aspect in the development of educational leaders. It draws upon Michel Foucault's analysis of power and its relationship to his understanding of ethics as a practice one cultivates and takes on in the interests of leadership development. Foucault's work in these areas is timely for graduate…

As top-down mandates multiply, close supervision from outside the education field increases, and the professionalism of educators shrinks, criticism of neoliberal effects on education in the United States and elsewhere has become more frequent in professional publications. Neoliberalism, put simply, is the political philosophy that privileges free…

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government's reforms to secondary school Performance Tables have changed how schools make decisions about the subjects and qualifications entered by their pupils. The National Pupil Database is used to explore these changes between 2005 and 2014. We find that schools are responding to accountability…

Existing principal evaluation research has failed to include the perspectives of multiple stakeholders. The present research study used focus group interviews to gather data about designing a principal evaluation process that includes these perspectives. Focus groups were conducted with principals, parents, certificated staff, and classified…

Corruption is a constant global phenomenon, which is becoming more complex and intense as competition for resources increases. It is even more so amongst those living in developing countries, particularly emerging economies such as South Africa. Acts of corruption directly contest the basic principles of South Africa's Constitution, which aims at…

This article provides a critique of current debates about what quality enhancement is for and what it does. It outlines a conceptual framework drawing on different understandings of quality assurance and quality enhancement in higher education, which helps to refine the role of quality enhancement in improving student learning. The paper analyses…