At the request of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Research Universities, the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) have assembled a set of ten recommendations for regulatory reform that would improve research…

"Leadership Standards In Action: The School Principal as Servant-Leader" is a powerful resource for aspiring principals, practicing principals, district leadership, and university faculty. The book responsibly unpacks the metaphor of principal as servant leader to the school's people and purpose. As a framework, the six ISLLC Standards of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the real-world practice of evaluation capacity building (ECB) in the small-medium sized nonprofit context. The study aimed to map the activities, processes, and outcomes of ECB in these nonprofits in light of the competing external and internal evaluation contexts facing nonprofits in an age of…

The Center on Education Policy (CEP), an independent nonprofit organization, has been monitoring national adequate yearly progress (AYP) data going back to school year 2005-06. In April 2011, the author and her colleagues released a report with estimates of the number of schools in the nation and each state that did not make AYP in 2010, as well…

An examination of the current government policy discourse on social value and the capturing of social impact leads immediately into the centre of the fast-moving and transforming public-sector reform agenda. The thinking around social value takes an individual to the heart of contracting, localism, the relationship between the public sector and…

This paper explores the impact of the increasingly performative nature of the assessment of teachers' performance in England leading to the introduction of "Professional Standards for Teachers" in 2007. It reports the findings of a small-scale study of newly-qualified primary school teachers in the context of literature on teacher…

Regional accrediting bodies require evidence that higher education institutions are meeting their stated goals. Institutions have answered this call for accountability by assessing student learning. Managing change in order to implement assessment practices is a challenge, however, particularly when autonomy, academic freedom, and shared…

Educational standards, assessments, and accountability systems are of immense political moment around the world. But there is no developed theory exploring the role that these systems should play within a democratic polity in particular. On the one hand, well-designed standards are public goods, supported by assessment and accountability…

Accountability systems have important implications for schooling. Missing from discussions about their implementation, however, are ways they affect teacher responsibility. Responsibility has been insufficiently explicated in the education literature, including its impact on teacher motivation, emotion, and behavior. We propose that a…

This article examines "caring" in the context of radical education reform in one Canadian province and school district. Historical provincial policy documents set the context for the district analysis. Drawing on our experiences both as participants and researchers, we use theories of care, critical policy, and the tools of critical…

Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward,…

Neoliberalism has spread globally and operates hegemonically in many fields, including science education. I use historical auto/ethnography to examine global referents that have mediated the production of contemporary science education to explore how the roles of teachers and learners are related to macrostructures such as neoliberalism and…

This article reports on a research project that studied the approaches to leadership adopted by head teachers in one local authority in an area of extreme social deprivation in northern England. Using data from semi-structured interviews which was analysed using three software packages, it examines how far the heads use either transactional or…

This is a wonderfully provocative question that might be answered simply: Yes, teachers can be leaders! Much more complicated and interesting, though, are the specifics of how teachers become leaders and the different ways teachers lead. Before considering how teachers become leaders, there is a need to understand the context within which teachers…

The working theory of internal accountability has emerged as an alternative model for thinking about educational accountability. Internal accountability is defined by three layers of interaction: 1) individuals' sense of responsibility; 2) shared norms and expectations among individuals in an organization; and 3) the capacity of the organization…