This paper focuses on the perspectives of minority/racialized students in urban high schools. It is based on findings of interviews with 85 students in six secondary schools in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, and in Melbourne, Australia, during 2016-2019. While there has been increasing attention to closing the racial achievement gap and some…

Global contexts of accountability have placed unprecedented pressure on school leaders to improve the performance of their schools. Despite recognition that leaders' influence is mediated by school culture, few studies offer systematic examinations of culture-in-action in schools. The concept of culture remains nebulous and is frequently glossed…

This paper presents interview data from research conducted in two public high schools in the state of Queensland, Australia. The research was concerned with exploring issues of equity and diversity. Both schools had recently converted to "independent" status within a new state policy reform--the Independent Public Schools initiative.…

Accountability agendas are influencing the secondary education sector in Australian schools. Analysis of student achievement, student feedback mechanisms and personal reflection are forming part of these agendas as methods of teacher evaluation. Additionally, and more recently, teacher evaluation through "peer review" is emerging as a…

After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

In the age of educational accountability, national and statewide measures are assumed to secure and improve the educational quality. However, educators often wonder how much a new accountability measure may improve the actual teaching and learning practices when the agents of change (teachers) are not active participants of such educational…

This article will argue that diverse national, regional and local contexts leave different rooms for manoeuvre for school principals. The social technologies applied by the authorities (like accountability systems) can be "tight" or "loose" and so leave little or much room for principals' interpretations of what a good school…

Hong Kong is seeking to increase the use of "assessment for learning" rather than rely on "assessment of learning" through summative examinations. Nearly 300 teachers from 14 primary and secondary schools answered a Chinese translation of the Teachers' Conceptions of Assessment inventory and a new Practices of Assessment…

Constructivist pedagogies are generally not considered to support the teaching of mathematics for externally assessed examination-based courses. In large part, teachers have believed that such approaches are inefficient in covering a set syllabus. This article summarises the author's learning journey in Year 12 mathematics in 2004 where attempts…

Most other nations have a very different approach to measuring academic achievement at the end of high school and signaling that information to universities and other interested parties. In Australia, Denmark, England, Scotland, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and many Canadian and German provinces, for example, high school exit…