This ethnographic case study, situated in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, examined the effects of full-scale provincial testing on families, its influences on homework, and familial accountability for teaching and learning. Data were drawn from family interviews, as well as letters and documents regarding homework. Teachers sensed a significant…

Background: Measuring, assessing and managing outcomes in school practice environments is difficult due to the complex nature of school communities as well as the recent shift in service-delivery models towards tiered approaches. In tiered approaches, multiple levels of service are offered to better match students' needs. Each level of service may…

A continued gap exists in student achievement between Indigenous and non- Indigenous students in the British Columbia school system. This article analyzes the balance of success and failure of the Accountability Framework, a provincial program designed to increase graduation rates in the province. In order to understand the successes and failures…

Indigenous communities and students have been marginalized by colonial practices, disproportionally referred to special education programs, and encounter systematic prejudice and discrimination in education systems that lack respect for their ways of knowing and being. To disrupt hierarchical practices and structures that enact a hidden curriculum…

Given the longstanding role of grades in education, and their increased use for high-stakes decisions including student mobility, admission, selection, and accountability, this paper presents a systematic review of grading policies across all 10 Canadian provinces and 3 territories. In total, 23 policies were inductively analyzed for their…

The practice of measuring Indigenous achievement dates back to the early 1960s. Since then, Indigenous people have been subjected to a number of different standardized assessments intended to capture indicators of their well-being. Unfortunately, little attention has been given to the cultural appropriateness of subjecting Indigenous people to…

The purpose of this paper was to examine the relationships between pre-service teachers' conceptions of assessment and their intended approaches to classroom instruction and assessment. We operationalised approaches to instruction and assessment according to Achievement Goal Theory, postulating that pre-service teachers approach instruction and…

This paper examines a model of decision-making within the context of current and emerging regimes of accountability being proposed and implemented for school systems in a number of jurisdictions. These approaches to accountability typically involve the use of various measurable student learning outcomes as well as other measures of performance to…

Leadership is a highly complex activity, as leaders respond to increasing diversity and external accountability. Additionally, there is increased recognition that leadership is deeply contextual, sensitive to macro-politics of systems and micro-politics of individual schools. In Ontario, Canada, the school improvement effort is focused on raising…

As states adopt and implement bold education reforms intended to dramatically increase a student's likelihood of graduating from high school prepared for college and career, there is a strong sense among many states that reporting the right data to the right people at the right time, and reporting it well, is an essential path toward meeting their…

This Annual Service Plan Report discusses the results related to measures in the Ministry of Education's 2016/17-2018/19 Service Plan. British Columbia's education system continues to rank among the best in the world. This year over 640,000 students attended public and independent schools in every corner of the province, eager to develop their…

As states adopt and implement bold education reforms intended to dramatically increase a student's likelihood of graduating from high school prepared for college and career, there is a strong sense among many states that reporting the right data to the right people at the right time, and reporting it well, is an essential path toward meeting their…

Over the past three decades, educators have faced an increasing variety of reform proposals that can best be contextualized as efforts to commodify and privatize public education. While supporters of market-based reforms attempt to place these proposals within education theory, they are in reality firmly entrenched in neoliberal economic theory.…

It has become a normative practice to include Performance-Based Accountability (PBA) policies in educational reforms to foster school changes that enhance student learning and success. There is considerable variation in PBA models that have an important impact on how they operate in schools. It is, therefore, important to characterize PBA models…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…