In 2023, charter school advocates continued to make legislative gains in statehouses across the country. These gains were made in red, blue, and purple states, oftentimes in ways that showed bipartisan support for charter schools remains firmly in place. In looking at the results of this year's legislative sessions across the country, four…

Purpose: Accounts for failures of merit pay in educational settings were stagnated by the "political obstruction hypothesis," which blamed teacher unions for impeding the merit pay schemes from proper function. It required stronger evidence from both public and private schools to refute this hypothesis. Design/Approach/Methods:…

In the United States, most students attend a public school in a district overseen by a democratically elected school board. In political science, school boards are often portrayed as ten thousand democracies (Berkman and Plutzer, 2005). School board members are often described as "citizens-policymakers" because they "constitute a…

Charter schools are privately operated public schools funded by the government with oversight from school districts, state education departments, or other government authorizers. This gives charter schools autonomy from many government rules and regulations, allows them to specialize and innovate in particular types of education, and gives parents…

The Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) accredits all public schools in the state through the Kansas Education System of Accreditation (KESA). KESA is designed to evaluate at a system level, meaning school districts, a system of schools, or an independent school not affiliated with a school district. District leaders have been frustrated…

State and national school accountability policies situate preventing chronic absenteeism on par with meeting state standardized test benchmarks. We question relying on school attendance as both a component of accountability policies and a means of enhancing equity in schools. Our research suggests out-of-school factors unrelated to missed…

The study inspects the status of school governance and school outcome at primary school level and set up roadmap for all the stakeholders to achieve the mandate of Goal 4 in SDGs within 2030, especially in the context of rural India. The status of school governance and school outcome are assessed under 4 dimensions and 16 parameters through a…

Accreditation holds a place within accountability systems as a mechanism to evaluate quality that leads to the practices that certify credentials. In K-12 school district these credentials manifest in curriculum, instruction, standards, and ultimately the certifying of credits that lead to receipt of a diploma. School district leadership would…

Chronic absenteeism is the most extreme form of truancy and includes students who miss more than 10% of the school year (Conry & Richards, 2018). The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2015 required states to choose a non-cognitive measure to evaluate school performance. Tennessee has chronic absenteeism selected…

Educational leaders are increasingly expected to use school climate data to improve outcomes and promote equity for all learners, including in California where school climate is included in state accountability policy. In this study, beliefs towards school climate assessment were explored in a sample (n=298) of California superintendents using a…

Accountability-era reforms have promulgated a discourse of crisis and a looming threat for public schools. While these threats negatively affect all, this paper focuses on how schools' responses to these threats shape novice Teach for America Corp Members' (CM) socialization. By analyzing nearly 6,000 daily reflections from 38 CMs about their…

Should school boards be in charge of schools? School boards serve as sites for local democracy, but their power has been under siege for over half a century. This study provides results from an original survey in order to assess who Americans want in charge of their schools. Given that the strength of school boards is supposed to be their ability…

Passed in 2001, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) codified the use of educational accountability systems that rely on largely quantitative measures -- standardized tests, especially -- to assess student learning outcomes, rank order districts and schools according to these outcomes, and prescribe sanctions for schools and districts not…

Educational equity is understood as the recognition of a school system to ensure resources to safeguard that all students have equitable access, opportunity, and outcomes (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2015). Yet inequity persists in the American educational system. School accountability remains at the forefront of education policy to ensure equitable…

The practice of grading students began in the late 1800s and became institutionalized within the educational system. Grading in K-12 education has remained relatively unchanged in its purpose, intent, and use for nearly a century while simultaneously becoming an increasingly critical factor that impacts student opportunities, external perceptions…