Purpose: Accounts for failures of merit pay in educational settings were stagnated by the "political obstruction hypothesis," which blamed teacher unions for impeding the merit pay schemes from proper function. It required stronger evidence from both public and private schools to refute this hypothesis. Design/Approach/Methods:…

In the United States, most students attend a public school in a district overseen by a democratically elected school board. In political science, school boards are often portrayed as ten thousand democracies (Berkman and Plutzer, 2005). School board members are often described as "citizens-policymakers" because they "constitute a…

State and national school accountability policies situate preventing chronic absenteeism on par with meeting state standardized test benchmarks. We question relying on school attendance as both a component of accountability policies and a means of enhancing equity in schools. Our research suggests out-of-school factors unrelated to missed…

The study inspects the status of school governance and school outcome at primary school level and set up roadmap for all the stakeholders to achieve the mandate of Goal 4 in SDGs within 2030, especially in the context of rural India. The status of school governance and school outcome are assessed under 4 dimensions and 16 parameters through a…

Educational leaders are increasingly expected to use school climate data to improve outcomes and promote equity for all learners, including in California where school climate is included in state accountability policy. In this study, beliefs towards school climate assessment were explored in a sample (n=298) of California superintendents using a…

Accountability-era reforms have promulgated a discourse of crisis and a looming threat for public schools. While these threats negatively affect all, this paper focuses on how schools' responses to these threats shape novice Teach for America Corp Members' (CM) socialization. By analyzing nearly 6,000 daily reflections from 38 CMs about their…

Should school boards be in charge of schools? School boards serve as sites for local democracy, but their power has been under siege for over half a century. This study provides results from an original survey in order to assess who Americans want in charge of their schools. Given that the strength of school boards is supposed to be their ability…

Passed in 2001, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) codified the use of educational accountability systems that rely on largely quantitative measures -- standardized tests, especially -- to assess student learning outcomes, rank order districts and schools according to these outcomes, and prescribe sanctions for schools and districts not…

Educational equity is understood as the recognition of a school system to ensure resources to safeguard that all students have equitable access, opportunity, and outcomes (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2015). Yet inequity persists in the American educational system. School accountability remains at the forefront of education policy to ensure equitable…

This study was aimed at exploring the students' voice and power accountability relationships for curriculum implementation in rural public primary schools in the east Wollega zone, Oromia region, Ethiopia. An exploratory case study type and a multiple case study research design with a qualitative approach were employed to achieve the study's…

This qualitative study located in a critical interpretivist paradigm focused on what are the factors that contribute to high learner performance at a public school in South Africa. The data was produced via interviews with the participants as well as observations of various school activities and documents. Artistic licence was used and the data…

Educational accountability is dominated by a focus on test scores to assess academic achievement. An emerging trend toward "next-generation" accountability includes a broader conception of student learning and multiple metrics. A policy design approach is used to analyze this trend. Four design elements--goals, actors, metrics, and…

For the past two decades, student perception surveys have become standard tools in data collection efforts. At the state level, however, "student voice" is still used sparingly. In this study, we examine the ways in which including student survey results might alter state accountability determinations. Reconstructing the accountability…

Minimal research has been conducted regarding success factors of high school students in rural districts. Through archival data retrieval, student interviews, and observations, this mixed methods study sought to identify success factors of juniors and seniors enrolled at one rural public school in South Texas. The impact of support systems, the…

Student mobility -- that is, students changing schools -- can be detrimental for the academic outcomes of mobile students. Students who change schools tend to experience lower test scores than their nonmobile peers, be at higher risk of getting retained a grade, and have higher drop-out rates. Student mobility may not only affect the academic…