Purpose: In light of the difficulty many districts face finding quality principal candidates, this article explores an informal recruitment mechanism of teachers to become principals, which the authors call tapping. The authors assess the extent to which current teachers are being approached by school leaders to consider leadership and whether…

The author reports on a new study which reveals that the lowest-performing public K-8 schools often linger in that state for years, neither improving enough to get off accountability life support nor being shuttered completely. The study adds that persistently failing charter schools fare no better than regular public schools. Of 2,025 chronically…

The purpose of this study was to explore the present status of efforts to assess student-learning outcomes within the bachelor's degree granting institutions of the campuses in one system of public higher education. Further, the purpose of this study was also to understand what challenges and criticisms academic leaders report about the call to…

Recent years have seen the convergence of two major policy streams in U.S. K-12 education: standards/accountability and teacher quality reforms. Work in these areas has led to the creation of multiple measures of teacher quality, including measures of their instructional alignment to standards/assessments, observational and student survey measures…

Drawing upon research on federalism, localism, and professional autonomy, this article explores how educational stakeholders used social media to discuss and organize against the implementation of Differentiated Accountability in a large Florida school district. The results showed that the stakeholders used social media to engage in sense making…

Value-added evaluations use student test scores to assess teacher effectiveness. How student achievement is judged can depend on which test is used to measure it. Thus it is reasonable to ask whether a teacher's value-added score depends on which test is used to calculate it. Would it change if a different test was used? Specifically, might a…

While most states require testing in social studies or civic education, two states attach consequences for students and schools based on required statewide civics exams. Lawmakers in Florida, in 2010, and in Tennessee, in 2012, approved legislation that holds students accountable for their civics knowledge. Students are taking the tests for the…

All of the 15 states in this study have recently been involved in school accountability system reform. Since 2011, the states have taken advantage of a federal program to give them flexibility around certain accountability requirements of the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 (NCLB), the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and…

Improving teacher preparation is critical to long-term improvement in teacher quality. More than 200,000 new teachers enter classrooms each year. Increasing student enrollment, the retirement of baby boom generation teachers, and high attrition in their first five years (between 40 and 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession) have…

Privatization has been used to address the limited capacity of government to achieve positive results in child welfare systems. Privatized systems have not realized better outcomes than their public counterparts, however, and many states continue to struggle with implementation. In order to demonstrate that privatization is in fact an investment…

Teachers are catalysts to the success of high-stakes accountability policies, yet noticeably absent from previous studies is an examination of teachers' responses toward being held accountable for their students' performance on state-mandated, high-stakes assessments in low socioeconomic status (SES) school settings. An on-line survey instrument…

"The Infrastructure of Accountability" brings together leading and emerging scholars who set forth an ambitious conceptual framework for understanding the full impact of large-scale, performance-based accountability systems on education. Over the past 20 years, schools and school systems have been utterly reshaped by the demands of…

Many of the policies that fall under the school accountability umbrella are designed to incentivize students. Prominent among these are high school exit exams, standardized tests that, in some states, students must pass to earn a high school diploma. Proponents of these tests argue that by incentivizing students, they induce them to work harder…

Current federal legislation holds schools accountable for ensuring that all students, including those with disabilities, make adequate yearly progress on academic achievement measures, while also including students with disabilities in general education settings whenever possible. Schools are thus expected to be both excellent and equitable in…

The content of this guide was derived from ongoing work of a working group on growth models coordinated and facilitated by the SLDS Grant Program's State Support Team. The Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Grant Program was asked by several states to review current growth models with the goal of determining the impact of different models…