The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to examine the relationship between teacher's perceptions of school climate and student achievement of middle school students. Two hundred twenty middle school teachers, from a large urban school district located in the Southwestern region of the US, participated in the "New Jersey School Climate…

In education, assessment helps shape teaching practices and student outcomes, as it influences how teachers perceive their roles, approach instruction, and engage with students. This study investigated 3rd-8th grade English Language Arts and mathematics teachers' conceptions of the NWEA MAP Growth assessment, focusing on four key factors: (1)…

This paper examines how the policy process around initial teacher education (ITE) during the pandemic of 2020 was experienced by the leaders of ITE programmes across England. Education policies, it is argued, are solutions to perceived problems, revealing latent values that drive action. Group interviews with leaders of ITE programmes across the…

As educators can open and close implementational and ideological spaces for bilingualism, they are language policy agents. Concurrently, their language ideologies are also informed and shaped by dominant discourses such as the discourse of accountability and neoliberalism. Inspired by ethnographic studies, this qualitative study explored the…

This article presents a mixed method study on how to develop a participatory education management model as an alternative to the Turkish education administration system. Consisting of qualitative and quantitative methods, the mixed research method has been adopted to acquire the required data. Qualitative phase the education administration systems…

This briefing note considers the place for statutory testing in primary schools during 2020-21, in the light of the COVID crisis. The English system of primary statutory assessment, culminating in SATs tests in Year 6, was suspended during the 2020 lockdown. Yet many questions remain about how primary assessment should resume, given that COVID-19…

Propelled by accountability policies, leaders have touted data-driven decision making as a means to improve K-12 student outcomes and drive equity, as teachers analyze data to change instruction. However, many data-driven decision-making reforms have failed to challenge inequity. Melanie Bertrand and Julie Marsh's study of six middle schools shows…

Public policies have a moral order, an ethical horizon. They offer a vocabulary of imagined micro-policies. Using the case of Chile, this paper examines the ways in which accountability policies are reworked within schools and how they affect actors' subjectivities. It adds new findings to the existing body of research on school accountability…

Following the trend of consequential accountability in US public education, New York City introduced a teacher evaluation program during the 2013-2014 school year that linked teachers' individual performance ratings with their students' exam scores. As this program systemically alters the nature of teacher--student relationships by transforming…

Scholars of the global phenomenon of international student assessments (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) have paid little attention to the ways in which student users of these material objects are "configured" in nations that are located at the periphery of knowledge production. Our analysis takes the United Arab Emirates as its case study to capture…

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…

This case study examines how district administrators and high school mathematics and science teachers use data in instructional decision making and what challenges they face in the current accountability context. Findings reveal unique aspects of data use directly related to a high school setting within the context of test-based accountability and…

An increased emphasis on writing standards has recently led many U.S. states to incorporate text-based writing assessments into their test-based accountability system. This creates political and pedagogical tensions that teachers must navigate in their classroom use of writing rubrics. While prior research has focused on rubric design and/or the…

This briefing note is intended to prompt discussion on how to repair the fragilities in the education system that COVID has revealed. Over the length of our research project we have seen a gulf open up between government policy announcements and primary schools' experiences of the crisis on the ground (Bradbury, 2020). Our data show teachers, head…

This mixed method research explores the contexts, purposes, forms, practices, and effects of school provided collaborative professional development (PD) as experienced by teachers working in primary and secondary schools in England and Shanghai. The research is part of a larger partnership pilot study by the University of Nottingham and Shanghai…