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Brigham Young University has been consistently accredited by National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) since 1954. Our accreditation reports of past years focused on input information – general goals, complicated organization diagrams, and clinical performance assessments. When NCATE moved from inputs to outcomes with evidence grounded in measurable data, we worked collaboratively among teacher education faculty, faculty from the arts and sciences colleges, and public school partners to overhaul our assessment system and design new instruments. Our current accreditation reports include course and clinical assessments aligned with specific program outcomes, statistical charts detailing the levels at which these outcomes are being met, and documentation of programmatic decisions based on the findings of our assessments. Moving from input descriptions to output evidence was a painful process. However, we have come to appreciate the usefulness and value of our experiences, the tools that emerged, and the new decision-making processes we now engage in. This chapter is a recounting of our frustrations and the lessons we learned as we moved toward a culture of data-based decision-making.

Teacher education reform in the United States has been an ongoing theme over the past 100 years, particularly since A Nation at Risk in the 1980s, when education became increasingly politicized and less of a public good with which the American public did not tinker. These reforms have four different themes: (1) strengthening the clinical component of teacher education, (2) preparing educators with the tools needed for equity and social justice, (3) participating in heightened accountability demands, and (4) expanding alternative certification. This chapter explores these four strands of reform and concludes they are colliding forces in which the country pours time, resources, and energy. Ongoing collisions on the reform landscape produce increasingly negative consequences for teacher education, teacher recruitment, and retention and America's public schools.

This chapter focuses on accountability and accreditation policies and practices in teacher education in the United States, England, Wales, and China. Despite the differences between countries, issues and problems of teacher education from country to country are remarkably similar. As a profession, we must examine where we are and where we need to be to meet the needs of our global society. We can begin by defining quality teaching and the essential skills for 21st-century teachers and students. As part of a global profession, teachers and educators must not work in isolation. It will be up to the leaders in the profession to educate political and accreditation bodies by sharing models that will meet the needs of our changing world. Can we give up the nostalgic notions of education and provide assistance to education preparation professionals to move toward new rapid-change models?

Neo-institutional theory suggests that organisations change occurs when institutional contradictions, caused by exogenous and endogenous dynamics, increase over time to the point where change can no longer be resisted. Human praxis will result, but only when sufficiently powerful interests are motivated to act. This paper aims to examine the role that the accreditation of business schools can play in increasing institutional contradictions and hence fostering organisational change towards stakeholder engagement and engagement with social responsibility and sustainability issues. Numerous accreditations are promulgated within the higher education and business school contexts and a number of these relate to, or have aspects that relate to, ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper first analyses the take up of accreditations across UK business schools and then uses a case study to illustrate and explore stakeholder engagement and changes related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability linked to accreditation processes.

Accreditations are found to be an increasingly common interest for UK business schools. Further, a number of these accreditations have evolved to incorporate issues related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability that may cause institutional contradictions and may, therefore, have the potential to foster organisational change. Accreditation alone, however, is not sufficient and the authors find that sufficiently powerful interests need to be motivated to act and enable human praxis to affect change.

This paper draws on previous research that considers the role of accreditation in fostering change that has also been carried out in healthcare organisations, public and professional bodies. Its findings stem from an individual case study and as such further research is required to explore whether these findings can be extended and apply more generally in business schools and universities in different contexts.

This paper concludes by recommending that the newly established UK & Ireland Chapter of PRME encourages and supports signatory schools to further embed ethics, social responsibility and sustainability into all aspects of university life in the UK. This also provides an opportunity to engage with the accrediting bodies in order to further support the inclusion of stakeholder engagement and issues related to this agenda in their processes.

This paper contributes by introducing accreditation as an institutional pressure that may lead indirectly to organisational change and supports this with new evidence from an illustrative case study. Further, it draws on the role of institutional contradictions and human praxis that engender organisational change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine attempts at jurisdictional expansion in the audit field. Specifically, the authors critically analyse the professional implications of “new audit spaces”, that is, novel auditing and assurance services that have emerged at intersections between audit and other fields such as the environment, the public sector, sport and education. The purpose is two-fold. First, to better understand the dynamics of new audit spaces, and second, to highlight the major challenges and adaptations prompted by these dynamics.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the authors highlight and problematise four issues central to the construction of new audit spaces: independence; reporting; professional accreditation; and the nature of the audit role.

The audit profession has experienced mixed success in seeking to annex new audit spaces; in some instances, practices initially located at the margins of auditing have moved towards its centre, while elsewhere projects have been abandoned, colonised by others or remain in flux. In these ventures, the accounting profession is brought into competition with other bodies of expertise and modes of practice. In new audit spaces, core elements of auditing, as conventionally conceived, are transmogrified as they travel.

This analysis calls into question some of the “sacred cows” of auditing and challenges the transferability of the capitals and habitus of the accounting profession in other domains. Future research avenues are suggested.

K-20 accreditation is contingent on having policies and procedures that provide evidence of quality assurance (QA) and quality improvement (QI), viewed here as the first of two conflicting paradigms, requiring concurrent expressions of excellence and need. Standardized summative assessments using the traditional tabular rubric design (typically writing assessments) serve the QA purpose well while leaving QI difficult to achieve. This is the second-related pair of conflicting paradigms – formative vs summative assessment. The purpose of this study is to illuminate these conflicts, present a sample illustrative solution and suggest that both institutions and accreditation agencies implement policies resolving these conflicts.

This viewpoint is based in part on an analysis of the content of many rubrics, with several selected for presentation herein. For K-12 settings, the AdvancED accreditation standards (used in 70 countries) and a multistate writing rubric are discussed. For postsecondary, a segment of the VALUE rubrics, used by a large number of postsecondary institutions across the USA, is presented. Examples of potential solutions for both levels are presented to clarify the problem and identify policy implications.

This specific aspect of the QA/QI challenge is a solvable problem, and a solution is proposed with the potential to improve learning in the USA and other countries.

Institutional personnel struggle with the conflicts often not realizing the source of their struggle. In this viewpoint, a new rubric format is suggested with the hope of initiating policy change discussions.

The purpose of this paper is to define what factors cause willingness and/or resistance among lecturers in universities towards external evaluation systems, especially accreditation.

A model has been designed to describe possible factors of willingness and/or resistance towards accreditation based on Ajzen and Metselaar. A literature review has been undertaken on the effects of external evaluation like ISO 9000 as well as accreditation systems such as Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and European Quality Improvement System. A questionnaire has been administered to a group of 63 lecturers from three departments at Fontys University in The Netherlands. The results of this preliminary survey have been presented to 1,500 academics in The Netherlands and Flanders to collect empirical data.

Resistance to accreditation can be found in the consequences of accreditation for the work of the lecturer (workload), negative emotions (stress and insecurity); the lack of knowledge and experience (help from specialists is needed); and lack of acceptance (other paradigm).

The paper provides more insight into the difficulties that organizations, especially universities, have to commit their employees to external evaluation. It might be possible to generalize the findings to other professionals in other organizations. Little research in this field has been undertaken so far.

Hospitals are held increasingly accountable for the services they provide. While small hospitals may often lack resources to meet performance measurement mandates, generally, they are not exempt from requirements to submit performance data to accrediting and regulatory bodies. Presents an approach to obtaining, developing, and evaluating performance indicators that may be useful to small hospitals in meeting their mandates for public accountability and quality improvement. Takes into account resource limitations faced by these hospitals, both human and technological, and suggests a number of measures that are potentially useful for demonstrating accountability, benchmarking, and quality improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and interpret the atypical case of Uruguay related to quality assurance, evaluation and accreditation of Higher Education in Uruguay.

To do so, a Higher Education conceptual framework is developed, focusing on quality assurance and formulating some “hypotheses” (conjectural ways of thinking within a qualitative tradition). The method to collect data includes the use of document observation, secondary information from official databases and interviews with an intentional sample of 10 experts and key informants. The analysis is developed through some conceptual dimensions emerging from the precedent sources (public policy and the role of the state, changes in the system of science, technology and innovation linked to Higher Education, the influence of the regional integration process and the weak public demand for quality assurance).

The paper also presents and discusses the atypical country’s experience regarding the lack of a national quality assurance policy and the structural dynamic of delaying main transformations by adopting graduate changes.

The study analyzes the recent process of Higher Education policies oriented to quality assurance in the two decades and a half between 1996 and 2021, focusing especially on the recent years (2019–2020).

The findings indicate that the Higher Education system needs to update its structure and shape, withdrawing fragmentation and consolidating a national system able to promote quality. The paper offers some inputs to strategic planning and debate.

Reforming Higher Education is key to change the social logic of High School, which still operates as a social selective mechanism, mainly oriented to the professional application rather than to knowledge production or management.

The paper contributes to the political and academic debate through some conceptual categories emerging from the study. The previous description of academic literature about Uruguay Higher Education quality assurance (QA) did not include either the new situation created by the approval of contradictory laws or the interpretation of this public policy arranged as a “structural dynamic of delay of the main transformations by adopting graduate and incremental changes”. Whether any originality could be found in the paper, it would be this way of interpreting the process of QA in Uruguay.

This chapter examines the recalcitrant effects of isolationism and the intentional efforts that are necessary to create authentic, collaborative partnerships between schools and universities, between schools and schools, and among educators. The tension between a vision of community and collaboration and the ability to enact that vision raises questions about the necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions required to be a part of a community-based professional culture, what it means to prepare teachers to work in such a professional community, and to question the unexamined assumptions about the definition of professionalism and teacher knowledge that undergird current accreditation and accountability frameworks. To relieve that tension, we must start demanding data that demonstrates preservice candidates' ability to work collaboratively toward more effective practice, rather than focusing so narrowly on statistics that describe what they know and have done individually within a classroom setting.