Since their introduction in the 1990s, explicit standards documents have pervaded higher education assessment--success likely linked to their compatibility with constructive alignment and quality assurance regimes. Researchers, however, criticise that such documents are based on a misconception of standards as explicit and absolute, when in fact…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how US school leaders and teachers make sense of multiple accountability policies, including the Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluation, and how this process relates to school priorities and classroom practice. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a comparative case study…

This study explores teachers' first enactments of a set of theory-based curriculum materials designed to support academic language instruction. Specifically, this multiple case study looks at how six middle school English teachers in three US schools adapted the materials; each case includes a pair of teachers, one novice and one more experienced.…

This paper explores the growing importance of measures of progress in judgements of schools' effectiveness in England, with a focus on the role of the early years (settings for children aged 2-5) in providing data for these measures. Qualitative data from a research project involving three diverse school-based and pre-compulsory early years…

An international agenda to raise educational "standards" and increase the accountability of schools has the unintended consequence of increased uniformity around pedagogical practices, and of introducing assessment practices that influence the way students experience learning. This paper explores how the self-assessment experiences of…

A study of two schools in northern Australia demonstrated the impact on Education for Sustainability (EfS) initiatives of a disruptive policy environment set in motion by neoliberal reforms focused on standards, accountability, and international competitiveness. In one of the schools, a culture characterized by trust and an emphasis on cultivating…

Private higher education is growing, especially in developing and transitioning countries. Rapid growth frequently comes with concerns about quality. This article explores challenges and opportunities for higher education quality among private universities in Bangladesh. By presenting a vertical case study that explores interactions among actors…

This article reports on an interview with Marcia McCaffrey, the state arts consultant for the New Hampshire Department of Education and current president of the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE). The discussion revolved around how the new arts standards may interact with evolving structures of arts teacher evaluation…

Problem: There is an existing cycle of questionable grading practices at the K-12 level. As a result, districts continue to search for innovative methods of evaluating and reporting student progress. One result of this effort has been the adoption of a standards-based grading approach. Research concerning standards-based grading implementation has…

Demands on higher education institutions are growing. Stakeholders are demanding proof of quality to ensure students are receiving the education they are paying for. Institutional accountability is a growing concern for higher education institutions, more specifically community colleges. The diverse characteristics of community colleges have made…

Since its inception in 1992 Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) has inspected schools under Section 9 of the Education (Schools) Act 1992; Section 10 of the School Inspections Act 1996; and Section 5 of the Education Act 2005. Pressure on England to improve its system of education has not only emerged…

This article focuses on the response of educational leaders to No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) market-driven and sanctions-laden reforms as part of a political spectacle in which discourses link accountability and educational effectiveness to the advance of capitalism. Drawing on data collected during a multiyear ethnography of NCLB, this article…

This article explores how one specially prepared, accomplished teacher managed dilemmas that arose as she worked to enact responsive language arts instruction with English Learners in a policy context that privileged high-stakes accountability and standardization. Drawing on sociocultural learning theory, the article illustrates how the teacher's…

The framing of teaching standards within restrictive managerial or collaborative democratic ideologies impacts significantly on initial teacher education. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore teacher educators' (n = 13) perspectives on beginning teacher standards for physical education teacher education in Ireland. Teacher educators…

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…