Many institutions are trying to better understand the factors that drive student success and failure in order to improve the efficiency of degree production. Traditional academic reporting systems are not adequate for this purpose, since they are designed to measure outcomes, not to uncover the factors that influence them. To address this problem,…

Charter school authorizing is a powerful strategy for making excellent public schools and educational opportunities available to all students. Done well, charter authorizing increases student achievement by expanding the supply of quality public schools to satisfy unmet needs--particularly by providing life-changing opportunities for students…

Every college struggles to create processes of quality assurance and continuous improvement to demonstrate and ensure its service to students and community. Accreditation is one avenue that ensures some uniformity across many institutions in the eyes of the public. While this paper focuses on accreditation processes and meeting the needs of…

MC Squared STEM High School is part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. It has a project-based curriculum that focuses on the core stem skills: science, technology, engineering, and math. As the school celebrated its first graduating class in 2012, administrators felt it was the right time to look back and evaluate the school's…

This paper seeks to analyze Teach for America (TFA) in terms of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence in an attempt to expose the ways in which this organization perpetuates structures of inequality in the existing social order. The paper begins with a general description of TFA, followed by an overview of several studies in support…

This study examines the ways in which different research perspectives have tended to problematize global university rankings (GURs). An analytical framework is applied to help articulate four distinct research discourses that have been applied to GURs. The framework distinguishes research problems which are locally defined and "emergent" from…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a relationship between principal leadership styles, specifically change and influence styles, and teacher retention in the Low-Country region of South Carolina. Utilizing the Change Style Indicator and Influence Style Indicator, the researcher surveyed 25 principals from Berkeley, Charleston,…

This article presents, through a critical analysis, a reflection on a noticeable change that focuses on some aspects related to the assessment of different parts of the educational system. In particular, it concentrates on the assessment of teaching institutions which has been considered by authorities that are distant from the school life and…

University rankings are key drivers in national and institutional strategic planning. The increase in the number of university ranking systems and the diversity of methods and indicators used by these systems necessitate the development of an index that can measure a university's performance in all these systems at once. This article presents…

Higher education institutions are increasingly concerned about accreditation. Although sustainable market orientation (SMO) bears on academic accreditation, to date, no study has developed a valid scale of SMO or assessed its influence on accreditation. The purpose of this paper is to construct and validate an SMO scale that was developed in…

Since 2005, education in the Kingdom of Bahrain has undergone major reforms as part of the National Education Reform Project to achieve the goals of Bahrain's Economic Vision 2030. The Education & Training Quality Authority (BQA) was created by a Royal Decree as an independent entity established that is responsible for ensuring quality in…

In the period between 2004 and 2006, several publications were released questioning the quality of higher education: One such report was from the 2006 Spellings Commission of the U.S. Secretary of Education, which prompted accrediting agencies to review institutional assessment practices. This research was designed to measure the impact Academy…

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular student growth percentiles (SGPs)…

The article explores the organisational impact of evaluation and control mechanisms on universities from the point of view of accountability. Three case studies are analysed with the aim of understanding the significance of these systems both at corporate governance level and in relation to their influence on the behaviour of the academic staff.…

Soft systems methodology is commonly used in organizational research and can be very useful when attempting to understand both organizational structures and dynamics. A teacher education institution is identified here as an organization. Soft systems methodology is employed to gain a picture of the current organizational structure of a Science and…