Little is known about the way that teachers cope with the formalisation of professional inquiry in New Zealand. Despite its systemic implementation as an accountability-driven initiative to improve the quality of education, there are varied interpretations and enactments of professional inquiry. In this article, we will explore one teacher's…

Middle leaders play an essential role in schools but for many their position is characterised by tensions caused by 'being caught in between or sandwiched between senior management to whom they were accountable … and subordinates for whom they had some functional and often moral responsibility'. Moreover, Catholic school middle leaders face…

Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. Secretary of Education, has a reform agenda to advance school choice. Her track record includes enabling charter school growth in Michigan at taxpayers' expense with little oversight or accountability. Although an effective advocate, DeVos represents a broader policy movement to privatize American education, much of it…

This study provides an overview and a snapshot of new student orientation (NSO) and new student e-orientation (NSEO) programs, with a focus on the content and feature analysis of the NSEOs. It offers an overview of currently available NSO programs of 100 randomly selected community colleges from a master list of nearly 900 community colleges in…

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of the Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED), declared a "new wave" of Local Area Under-performance Inspections (LAUI) of schools "denying children the standard of education they deserve". This paper examines how the threat of LAUI played out over three mathematics lessons taught by a teacher…

This article describes the evolution of a faculty scholarship symposium within the school of education at a regional comprehensive university. The article outlines the initial structure and goals of the symposium as well as the development of the model over time. The influence of leadership, culture, and individual goals and backgrounds are…

This paper provides insight into distributed leadership by contrasting the oppositional messages found in the literature, and by examining differences in the rhetoric and reality associated with its application. Specifically, the treatment of power and accountability within the distributed leadership theoretical framework is difficult to…

The requirement that individualized education program (IEP) teams make decisions about the participation of students with disabilities in general or alternate state- and district-wide assessments is nearly two decades old. The decisions that must be made have become more complicated with the addition, in some states, of alternate assessments based…

Using assessment data to determine student growth has become an integral part of the accountability movement, and researchers and educators are currently examining how new rules impact the academic assessment of gifted learners. In 2008, the Association for the Gifted's Annual Symposium at the Council for Exceptional Children Convention focused on…

At some level, principals always have been instructional leaders--but never before has their role been more prominent. First, the accountability movement--No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in particular--thrust principals into the spotlight on academic achievement. Then budget cuts peeled away capacity at both the district and school levels, thinning…

Effective professional development can support efforts to increase rigor in one's school. From the authors' research on the schools that won the U.S. Department of Education's Award for Staff Development, they found seven key characteristics that were apparent in staff development at these schools: (1) A clear purpose that is linked to research,…

Along with radically shifting priorities and practices to put better learning first, recent experiences and new research underscore a second, closely related imperative for districts--that principals get the high-quality training they need to be successful as frontline leaders of instructional change throughout their schools. In fact, no…

This paper will explore how to connect the administrative and professional perspectives in the era of accountability. Conflicting school accountability perspectives come from the contradiction between managerialism and professionalism. This inconsistency in accountability may have shifted the teaching profession's role toward supervisory…

This article identifies the major themes that emerge from the five selected articles in this special issue. Collectively, they demonstrate some trends occurring in the area of school leadership, but also show that individual countries are looking at these trends in different ways. It is an example of what might be called thinking globally but…

Many institutions develop specific measures or indicators--often called "dashboards"--to inform boards and top administrators about the college or university's current situation and performance and assist them in moving the institution ahead strategically. And, increasingly, institutions are using metrics not only to assess internal…