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This AERI-NEPC eBrief, the fourth in a series titled “Understanding validity issues around the world”, looks closely at issues surrounding the validity of test-based actions in educational accountability and school improvement contexts. The specific discussions here focus testing issues in the US. However, the general principles underlying appropriate and inappropriate test use in school reform and high stakes public accountability settings are applicable in both domestic and international settings. This paper aims to present the issues.

This policy brief is based on a synthesis of conference proceedings and review of selected pieces of extant literature. It begins by summarizing perspectives of an invited expert panel on the topic. To that synthesis, the authors add their own analysis of key issues. They conclude by offering recommendations for test developers and test users.

The authors conclude that recurring validity issues arise with tests used in school reform and public accountability contexts, because the external tests tend to be employed as policy instruments to drive reforms in schools, with unrealistic timelines and inadequate resources. To reconcile the validity issues with respect to educational assessment and forge a coherent understanding of validity among multiple public users with different agendas, the authors offer several recommendations, such as: adopt an integrated approach to develop content and standards of proficiency that represent a range of cognitive processes; support studies to examine validity of assessments and the effects of decisions taken with assessment data before results are fed into high stakes accountability-related actions that affect teachers, leaders or schools; align standards, curricula, instruction, assessment, and professional development efforts in schools to maximize success; increase capacity-building efforts to help teachers, administrators, policy makers, and other groups of test users learn more about assessments, particularly, about appropriate interpretation and use of assessment data and reports.

Baker points out that in response to growing demands of reformers and policy-makers for more frequent and rigorous testing programs in US public education, results from a single test tend to get used to meet a variety of public education needs today (e.g. school accountability, school improvement, teacher evaluation, and measurement of student performance). While this may simply be a way to make things more cost-efficient and reduce the extent of student testing in schools, a consequence is inappropriate test use that threatens validity in practice settings. This policy brief confronts this recurring validity challenge and offers recommendations to address the issues.

This chapter examines organizational and instructional responses of California's high schools to the introduction of a High School Exit Examination through interviews with 47 high school principals across the state. I found that most schools changed little about their organizational structure, and provided little support for students until after they failed the exam. Findings also indicate that the exit exam influenced the curriculum most significantly in low-performing schools and in low-track classes within higher performing schools. While the exit exam spurred some positive changes, it also led to unintended consequences inside classrooms.

Using a South African district of education as a case study, the purpose of this paper is to explore how high-stake assessments informed by marketisation and managerialism have been embedded in the South African education system.

This papers draws on data that were collected through a mixed method approach in the secondary schools of the uMgungundlovu District, which is in Kwazulu-Natal province (KZN) in the eastern part of South Africa. This paper emerged from multiple sources of data, that is, from documents, interviews, questionnaires, and observation as well as secondary sources.

The paper demonstrates how the pincer movement of markets and managerialism have used high-stake testing as a mechanism of performativity. It illustrates how test scores are published in newspapers to provide consumers with information that is needed for full participation in the marketised education system.

The insights from this paper have profound implications for school managers and policy makers. While high-stake tests are logically consistent and theoretically defensible, overdependence on them portends the replacement of traditional values of schools by the market value of the education.

The study contributes profound insights into how the high-stake testing serves the purpose of social control and subjugation mechanisms for students, schools, and teachers by the state and the invisible arm of the markets. The problem with the use of high-stakes testing as performativity mechanisms is not just that they hinders learning and teaching, but it changes the work of schools and teachers who are at the chalkface of education system.

The central argument in this paper is that ethical school leadership is imperative in a context of increasing performance-driven accountability. The purpose of this paper is to focus on school principals’ perceptions of how they understand ethical leadership and how they lead the ethical use of data.

This study utilises semi-structured interviews with six state school principals (one primary and six secondary) to explore their perceptions of ethical leadership practices; and how they balance current competing accountabilities in a context of performance-driven accountability.

There were four key findings. First, principals used data to inform and direct their practices and their conversations with teachers. Second, while ethics was a central consideration in how principals’ led, practising in an ethical manner was identified as complex and challenging in the current context. Third, Starratt’s (1996) ethical framework proved to be relevant for interpreting principals’ practices. Finally, all of the principals referred to dilemmas they faced as a result of competing priorities and all used a variety of strategies to deal with these dilemmas.

While there is a small body of research that explores school leaders’ understandings of ethical tensions and dilemmas, there is little research that has focused on school leaders’ understandings of the ethical use of data. This study, then, contributes to this area as it provides a discussion on school principals’ leadership practices in the current climate driven by data use.

The purpose of this paper is to direct attention to the intersection of external and internal accountability systems within urban schools, and the role of school leadership, especially that of the principal, in managing this intersection. In particular, the paper explores how school leaders are able to strengthen and sustain the school's internal accountability system, in pursuit of school‐defined learning improvement agenda, and at the same time respond productively to external accountability demands. The paper also seeks to identify consequences of these leaders’ efforts to navigate an often problematic set of converging demands.

This paper draws on findings from a larger multi‐case study of learning‐focused leadership in 15 schools in four urban school districts in the USA. Schools were chosen to represent those that were “making progress” (by local measures). Data were collected over 18 months, spanning two school years, from Spring 2007 to Fall 2008. Data collection included multiple site visits, semi‐structured interviews and observations of leadership activity across school and district settings, and a variety of documentary evidence.

Though working in substantially different contexts, these leaders found remarkably similar ways of crafting tools and creating occasions, from the array of external accountability demands and resources, to serve internal accountability purposes. They did so by internalizing external expectations and developing accountable practice within the school, leading through data, and modelling what it meant to learn to lead in a fully accountable way. As they did so, they reshaped the scope of instruction and the instructional improvement conversation, and also made teaching and leadership practice more public.

This paper extends discussions of school‐level accountability in two ways. First, it updates scholarship on accountability by examining school‐level responses at a time five years into the new accountability context in the USA defined by strict system‐wide expectations and mechanisms. Second, the paper demonstrates ways in which the often onerous demands of external accountability systems can be treated as a resource by school leaders and used in ways that bolster the school's capacity for accountable professional practice.

In empirical research and practitioner guides, turnaround processes tend to be described in terms of discrete stages and strategies. Though necessary, this characterization belies the twists and turns of turnaround leadership. The purpose of this paper is to expand the assumptions of how turnaround proceeds in linear chronos time with the sensibilities of kairos time or the “right” time for turnaround leadership moves.

This study is an exploratory qualitative multi-case study with principals and their key supports (assistant principals, district leaders, teacher leaders) in four public turnaround schools. The grounded theory analysis conceptualizes the experiences of turnaround principals in flexible, complex ways.

The findings begin with a metaphor and definition of “shifting gears” at chronos and kairos times that emphasizes how turnaround principals make adaptive, agentic adjustments when moving forward through changing terrain. The second half of findings describes each principal’s experiences and reflections on their discernment of the right times for change within a chronological trajectory of turnaround. In addition, the leaders described shifting gears as strategic and responsive to contexts, sometimes taking a psychological toll.

Expanding notions of time in turnaround re-centers turnaround leaders as engaging in intellectually and emotionally demanding work. Such recognition challenges future research to address experiences and emotions in dynamic contexts. Hence, with this study, preparation programs and state and local systems may adjust holistic supports and leadership pipelines to sustain turnaround leaders.

The prevailing theory of action underlying accountability is that holding schools and students accountable will increase educational output. While accountability's theory of action intuitively seemed plausible, at the point of No Child Left Behind's national implementation, little empirical research was available to either support or critique accountability claims or to predict the long‐term impact of accountability systems on the success of at‐risk students and the schools that served them. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the work and perceptions of school teachers and leaders as they seek to meet the requirements of educational accountability.

Interviews with 89 administrators, staff and teachers revealed a variety of methods utilized to manage risks associated with low test scores and accountability ratings.

The findings reported in this paper challenge the proposition that accountability improves the educational outcomes of at‐risk students and indicates that low‐performing Texas high schools, when faced with the press of accountability, tend to mirror corporate risk management processes, with unintended consequences for at‐risk students. Low‐scoring at‐risk students were often viewed as liabilities by school personnel who, in their scramble to meet testing thresholds and accountability goals, were at‐risk student averse – implementing practices designed to “force kids out of school.”

In this paper, the authors use theory and research on risk management to analyze the work and perceptions of school teachers and leaders as they seek to meet the requirements of educational accountability. This paper is among the first to use this particular perspective to conceptualize and understand the practices of educational organizations with regards to the treatment of at‐risk students attending low‐performing high schools in the midst of accountability.

Here is a new conceptual framework for organizational learning (OL) that applies to both planned reform and emergent change. It integrates strategic and operational, micro and macro perspectives. It has three parts: (a) a revised definition and typology of OL, (b) seven reform stories that define stages and tasks, (c) a management and assessment guide demarcating four areas of OL: (i) action learning within core operations; (ii) sharing learning and innovations across the organization; (iii) mission/s-beyond ambidexterity; (iv) integration-managing mission conflicts and other paradoxes, which ensure endogenous change. Dynamic capability is therefore intrinsic to this view of OL that is illustrated from two cases: NYPD and public school reforms.