At the core of New Public Management (NPM) reforms sits the concept of accountability of publicly funded organizations. In Canada, it is suggested that provinces have increased the number of accountability procedures imposed on universities and that those measures would have had an impact on professors' academic workload. This study discusses the…

This article suggests that the implementation of human resource policies such as teacher performance appraisal (TPA) is a disturbance to the school organizational climate. Based on my cross-examination of both school managers' and teachers' discourse, I suggest that a new leadership approach needs to be developed at the school level to effectively…

What do course evaluation questionnaires (CEQs) do to our teaching and to our perceptions of ourselves as teachers? We are all early- to mid-career academics at a midsized Canadian university who explore how course evaluation questionnaires have affected our academic identities. By using autoethnography and critical reflection, we examine how CEQs…

While Canada lacks explicit central directives towards research productivity, academics experience frequent and intense reviews of their research, teaching and service through mechanisms such as elaborate tenure and promotion procedures and annual performance reviews. Given that newer academics are sometimes thought to be especially susceptible to…

In this era of accountability-by-numbers, the elevated status accorded to large-scale external assessments such as the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is symptomatic of a trend towards data-driven policy initiatives in education, and the need for regular sources of outcome data to constantly feed narrow indicators of…

Teacher performance appraisal policies are a part of a global complex of accountability based teacher policies. This paper is a study of the Ontario teacher performance appraisal (TPA) system. First, the paper describes the education reform contexts associated with the origins and adoption of the TPA policy. Then the paper reports on the results…

The document offers two definitions of accountability, a narrow one in which the teacher's salary must be based entirely upon a measurement of his teaching competence, and a broader one in which salary is related only partly to a measurement of competence. The major points for and against merit ratings are summarized, followed by a description of…

This study investigated the opinions of college faculty and administrators regarding the purpose, control, and process of performance evaluation, hypothesizing that job orientations and expectations would influence their opinions--that administrators would favor an economic model emphasizing authoritative and quantitative measures; teachers would…

This report is part of a study of school districts in British Columbia (Canada), and deals with school district ethos--interest in defined focal areas--both as a measure of school district quality and as a potential predictor of student achievement. The study concentrates on one of these focal areas--holding schools accountable through monitoring.…

This bilingual (English and French) report examines the debate surrounding a Task Force analysis of higher education institutions in Canada. The Task Force reported on a variety of topics regarding Canada's colleges and universities from teaching and learning through curricular design to student retention and institutional performance. In…