An urgent need to broaden diversity and support the preparation of students and faculty members along proactive pathways to research and success can be facilitated by targeted faculty development and formalization of policies built on institutional commitment, engagement, and accountability. Involvement of the faculty in building institutional…

School systems have access to more data than ever before, but most teachers and school leaders lack the skills to use the data for student and school improvement. Current attempts to use data have lacked depth and have been more focused on accountability and meeting state and federal requirements than on systematically investigating the factors…

The Open Government Partnership is an international initiative, committing governments to its principles of transparency. This article examines how it can advance the topic of freedom of educational choice, as it emphasizes the importance of parents' involvement in the decision-making process at the school level. The article is based on the case…

With increasing school autonomy, often coupled with greater accountability requirements, school leaders are increasingly responsible for new human resource management tasks. Policies to improve the teaching workforce, therefore, cannot do without policies to improve the school leadership profession. Teachers' effectiveness depends, among others,…

This study analyzes the content and discursive strategies within 39 introductory-level sociology course syllabi published in TRAILS, the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library of the American Sociological Association, from two different time periods (2004 and 2010) to explore the syllabus as a tool for socialization. We find that syllabi,…

This disguised case features a marketing major, Susan Lafleur, who presented Professor Higgins, the Department Chair, with a dilemma. She needed a petition signed to enroll in a capstone course while simultaneously taking a prerequisite course. She received an employment offer from a prestigious overseas corporation, which required a baccalaureate…

This article focuses on the broader political sphere as it affects superintendents and other constituents of rural districts. The current landscape of education reform focuses on accountability--particularly at the policy level of both state and federal education agencies. This article draws on the literature and an empirical study that examined…

A decade ago, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, along with the Ford and Annenberg Foundations, undertook a reform initiative, Teachers for a New Era (TNE). The goal of the TNE was to "stimulate construction of excellent teacher education programs at selected colleges and universities"(Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2001, p. 1). As…

This article aims to explain the role principals play in the variation in academic achievement between secondary schools in Hong Kong. The article draws on survey data from 179 key staff and 2,037 students from 42 schools. The study uses 2 analytical approaches. First, it employs classification and regression tree analysis (CART). This was used to…

This paper compares two contrasting educational policy responses to globalisation in Australia: the "New Basics" experiment that occurred in the State of Queensland (2000-2003) and the Australian Curriculum, which is currently being implemented across the nation from preschool to Year 10 in English, history, mathematics and science.…

Multiple factors influence teachers' grading and scoring of students' class work, homework, projects and tests. Put simply, bias in grading is giving different grades on student work of essentially equal quality, based on factors irrelevant to the scope and criteria for that work. Grading is to a degree subjective, but it need not be biased.…

All states have alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. For accountability purposes, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) allows up to 1% of students to be counted as proficient with this assessment option. In 2011 the U.S. Department of…

"Implementing Governance for a New Era" is an action plan to assist college and university trustees in reforming higher education. Delivered to more than 16,000 college and university trustees in November 2014, the plan provides details on how trustees properly represent the public by ensuring students receive a quality education at a…

There are two causes that have been suggested as the major contributors to poor student achievement. One view attributes student underachievement to educational factors such as inadequate standards and poor teachers. The other view sees societal factors as the main contributor to low student achievement. This commentary looks at one societal…

As voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs have expanded in recent years, another promising development has been the incorporation, into more such programs, of provisions that hold participating private schools to account for their students' performance. The newest and largest voucher programs, such as those in Louisiana and Indiana, have gone…