Search results

The most recent development in the accountability movement occurred in January 2002 when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law. Surprisingly little work has illuminated how teachers experience standards-based accountability policy. Using survey data and interviews, this chapter explores the impact of NCLB requirements, namely adequate yearly progress and needs improvement status, on teacher perceptions of working conditions, especially the use of time and empowerment. I show how the policy has led to restructuring of classroom time and increases in collaboration and yet, simultaneously, a decrease in teachers’ perceptions of empowerment.

This chapter examines the potential and barriers for evidence-based practices in Californian schools. In a large and complex school system, the state plays an important role in legitimating the use of certain types of evidence, but evidence-based practices are heavily determined by the resources, actors, and prevailing cultures in a local district environment. Until recently, high-stakes accountability policies mandated improvements in student test performance and intrusive interventions for failure. In recent years, the state has shifted to a different accountability approach that emphasizes local control and the use of multiple measures of school performance to pursue continuous improvement around locally developed goals and interventions. Amid this context, two stories arise about evidence-based practices in California. In one story, a set of major and highly touted districts have led the way in demonstrating evidence-informed continuous improvement district-wide. In these districts, the new state accountability approach, enabling leadership, long-term commitments to collective learning, networked opportunities to learn, and access to elite external expertise have contributed to fairly extensive practices of disciplined team problem-solving involving rich data. In a second story, schools and districts that face resource scarcity, high turnover, and conflict and in which past high-stakes accountability left a deep imprint on prevailing norms and routines, leaders and teachers have had difficulty establishing a conducive context for collective learning. However, given ingrained practices and limited absorptive capacity, it is not entirely clear how to enable productive evidence-based practices in such contexts.

In England, systematic school self-evaluation (SSE) began as model for school improvement. However, since 2000, and in the context of increasing moves toward ‘new public management’, it has become a policy priority for the Government which is inextricably linked to the inspection regime and risks becoming more closely associated with accountability than improvement. Such policies can, paradoxically, compromise school improvement (Fuhrman, 1993). This chapter will explore ways in which teachers and school leaders have attempted to engage in school self-evaluation in ways that allow them to maintain control of the evaluation agenda and retain the focus on improvement and pupils’ learning. It illustrates attempts by schools to engage with and reduce the negative side-effects of target-driven policies and the drive towards competition between schools. In particular, it will consider the benefits and challenges of inter-school collaboration through networking. It should certainly not be read as an endorsement of current policy developments in England and does not seek, as other chapters do in this volume, to address the key question of what kind of society we want? It offers a pragmatic exploration of some schools’ creative responses to the context in which they currently operate aimed at being more conducive to public rather than private good, that is meeting the needs of the ‘knowledge society’ as opposed to the ‘knowledge economy’ (Hargreaves, 2003).

The quality of teaching across the world is often defined by students’ academic achievement. Yet, teaching and learning is a complex phenomenon. Standards and policy documents, internationally and within India, specify knowledge and skills for teachers. A variety of evaluation tools exist to measure teaching performance. The authors describe a Teacher Performance Review Process (TPRP) using a diagnostic tool internationally benchmarked and contextualized for India. Initially, 408 teachers from 10 schools completed the TPRP, with 95 teachers from 3 schools completing two cycles of TPRP. The TPRP incorporated multiple sources of evidence for rating each teacher on 27 performance indicators using a four-point scale. Rating frequencies were analyzed and results reported for an initial and second cycle of TPRP. Feedback from teachers and school leaders indicated this process supported improving the quality of teaching. TPRP, implemented as a cyclical process capturing evidence from multiple sources over time, potentially provides comprehensive documentation of the complex phenomenon of teaching performance, and supports teachers in continuous improvement.

This chapter analyzes data from a five-year case study of a secondary school undergoing turnaround, supported by a federal School Improvement Grant. The findings explore how neoliberal policies perpetuate structural inequities in the day-to-day activities of schools by describing how district choice and accountability policies marginalize students of color in low socioeconomic positions. Findings explore the challenges faced by school leaders in a neoliberal policy context and highlight the importance of policy context in a successful improvement effort. The complex web of neoliberal polices of choice and accountability led to lower enrollment, which decreased the school's base funding and led to a greater proportion of students with skill gaps, significant socioemotional needs and students in need of special education services. For school improvement to be successful and to close the opportunity gap, leaders must dismantle and disrupt racist systems and structures bolstered by neoliberal policies.

This chapter explores the Scottish government policy drive for school improvement through processes such as distributed leadership, empowerment and cross-school collaboration to school settings. Compared to other nations, this shift towards collaboration has been relatively slow, but reflects the history of Scottish education, one where there is a reduced emphasis on individualist/competitive cultures and instead focuses on social justice and equity. This chapter discusses two programmes of work that were developed to foster school-to-school collaboration in the Scottish education system. In doing so, we comment on the conflict between national priority setting and the translation of this agenda at the local level by different local authorities.

Over the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has focused on market solutions (charter schools, privatization, and vouchers) and teacher evaluation through high stakes standardized testing of students. In this debate, teachers and their unions are often characterized as the problem. Our research offers an alternate path in the debate, a perspective that looks at schools as systems – the way schools are organized and the way decisions are made. We focus on examples of collaboration through the creation of long-term labor-management partnerships among teachers’ unions and school administrators that improve and restructure public schools from the inside to enhance planning, decision-making, problem solving, and the ways teachers interact and schools are organized. We analyzed how these efforts were created and sustained in six public school districts over the past two decades, and what they can teach us about the impact of significant involvement of faculty and their local union leadership, working closely with district administration. We argue that collaboration between teachers, their unions, and administrators is both possible and necessary for any meaningful and lasting public school reform.