Scratch the surface of a successful school and you will find a web of interactions that is the root of its success. Who is it that envisions, inspires, cajoles, and rallies all the various players in and around a school toward any improvement goal? Often it's a superintendent, a principal, a professor, a special teacher, or a parent. In a word,…

Countless reports have analyzed the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 on teacher quality and student achievement. What many of these reports truly leave behind, however, is the reality that state governments--not the federal government--have the strongest impact on the work of America's 3.1 million teachers. With that in mind, three…

The "State Teacher Policy Yearbook" examines what is arguably the single most powerful authority over the teaching profession: state government. This Colorado edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ's) "State Teacher Policy Yearbook" is the first of what will be an annual look at the status of state policies…

The combination of increasing demands for accountability and the desire to measure a variety of complex educational outcomes makes the use of performance assessment an essential addition to the tools used to profile student achievement. Performance assessment in education is valuable for student assessment and for the assessment of teacher and…

In 1985 the Arizona Legislature established a 5-year pilot-test program for teachers, under the direction of the Joint Legislative Committee on Career Ladders. Its purpose was to implement and evaluate a process of rewarding teachers based on their actual performance levels, rather than solely on years of experience and/or accumulated college…

Prior research has documented the failure of both staff development and teacher evaluation practices in schools to serve as sources of accountability and improvement for teachers. Few districts coordinate these two aspects of a human resource management system. Using a concept of organizational control, this study employs a qualitative methodology…

Changes in the structure of education and more money are what education in the eighties will require. There are some specific issues that can be identified and must be addressed in education: (1) revitalization of compensatory programs; (2) preparation of students to function in a multilingual, multicultural world; (3) accountability of educators…

The quality of education for nonwhite students in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) is examined in this report. Three areas are discussed: (1) student achievement; (2) evaluation of teachers, principals, and administrators; and (3) system accountability. Emphasis is placed on the accountability of the MPS to the black, American Indian, and…

It is possible for a district to develop a system of accountability that defines appropriate roles for lay citizens, pupils, teachers, administrators, and the board of education. It is not necessary for accountability to be imposed from the State level through mandates requiring Statewide assessments, competency-based teacher certification plans,…

This paper is part of a collection of 54 papers from the 48th annual conference of the Education Law Association held in November 2002. It discusses teacher evaluation by principals. Specifically, it presents findings of research that examined the nature of policy creation at the local board level in response to accountability legislation in North…

This collection of papers focuses on the preparation of teachers by university-based education programs. The papers are: "The STEPS That Support P-12 Learning and Achievement" (Diana Rigden), which describes the Standards-based Teacher Education Project (STEP) for improving student learning; "The Responsibility for Assessing Beginning Teachers"…

This review of state higher education assessment policies sought to test assumptions and conclusions reached during an initial phase of the study, to explore the dynamics of the process by which assessment becomes a state-level issue or concern, and to better understand the multifaceted relationship between state assessment policy and the…

Describes a study at an Israeli high school that investigated changes in the principal's role as the result of the introduction of a school management information system (SMIS). Discusses information handling and flow, interrelations with teachers, accountability, instruction evaluation, supervision, feedback, frequency of meetings, and shared…

This report discusses the Quality Assurance Program at the OSU/WOSC School of Education, a merged school serving Oregon State University and Western Oregon State College. This major reform in teacher education is designed to bring a high level of accountability to teacher education and is called a "Warranty of First-Year Teachers." If,…

As a response to demands for educational accountability, a contingency contracting model was developed at Prince George's Community College (Maryland). This human process-oriented system of accountability contains both planning and evaluation processes. The planning processes include development of goals and objectives based on assessment of the…