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The purpose of this paper is to examine issues of quality and quality assurance in Kenyan schools, identify reasons why Kenya government has difficulties in achieving its well documented search for quality education and to trace the process for ensuring the accountability of teachers in Kenya. This focus is done under conditions of significant changes in government policies and educational restructuring.

The reflections are done through a review of variety of research and analytical sources.

The review shows that the government, whose approach has been ambivalent and paradoxical, has determined teacher accountability and that the underlying cause of poor quality education in Kenya's schools is not the performance of teachers per se but deeply rooted management practices and other government policies which will have to change if this dream is to be realized. The evaluation of teachers' work should not be separated from development since quality is dependent on professional development. There is no development without challenge and quality development depends on the participation of all persons involved in teaching and learning.

The most obvious practical implication of this paper is that education in Kenya needs complete overhaul and not piecemeal reforms. Above all, there is need to invest regularly in the development of teachers, as teachers need access to continuous and effective updating and updating systems.

This paper provides an opportunity for reflection and builds a foundation on some of the key challenges that face education and teachers in Kenya. The paper suggests directions for leading Kenyan schools into a successful future.

The purpose of this paper is to examine first-year principals’ sense-making about two potentially conflicting demands as they take over low-performing urban schools: the demand to exert control over their teachers’ practice, and the need to build their teachers’ trust, collegiality, and commitment.

This study draws on a series of surveys and interviews with 12 first-year principals that took over some of the lowest-performing public schools in one large urban district.

Some principals begin their first year seeing their work to build accountability and commitment as complementary, while others see these two areas as in tension. Principals remain relatively consistent in these approaches over their first year on the job, although some principals change their views, generally coming to see these two areas as increasingly separate over time.

Future work should examine principals’ work to balance the demands of accountability and commitment in a variety of organizational contexts.

Principal preparation may benefit from training principals on the particular challenges they may face as they work with teachers in low-performing schools. Accountability systems may also seek to alter the demands placed on novice principals.

Despite the centrality of principals to school improvement, the prevalence of high-stakes school accountability, and findings on the importance of commitment to school success, little empirical research has examined how principals make sense of the potentially conflicting demands of accountability and commitment in highly pressured circumstances.

The purpose of this paper, three-study research project, is to establish and validate a two-dimensional scale to measure teachers’ and school administrators’ accountability disposition.

The scale items were developed in focus groups, and the final measure was tested on various samples of Israeli teachers and principals. Real-life accountability scenarios, individual work characteristics and performance evaluation were used for the validation. Correlational as well as multi-level statistical procedures were employed.

Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the two-dimensional structure: external and internal. Study 1 confirmed the convergent validity of the scale vis-à-vis accountability scenarios in teachers’ work. Study 2 confirmed its construct validity vis-à-vis related individual work characteristics such as goal orientation, work ethic and conscientiousness, using school principals as participants. Study 3 confirmed the scale’s predictive validity vis-à-vis teacher work performance.

The scale developed in this study may be used to enhance research on the personal aspect of accountability, contributing to a better understanding of educational systems operating in an accountability environment.

The study offers researchers a tool to measure accountability from an individual perspective. The two-dimensional scale developed in this study may help to point out individual differences in teacher accountability disposition.

The ability to assess personal accountability may contribute to society’s concern with school accountability and its effect on educators’ work.

Educational research in recent years is replete with studies on school accountability, but relatively little has been written on accountability at the individual level of analysis. Few scales exist that measure educators’ self-report accountability.

The primary purpose of this study is to test the measurement invariance and the latent mean differences of the personal accountability measure (PAM) constructs.

Obtained through the Turkish version of the PAM from a random sample of 453 teachers working in elementary and secondary schools in Aksaray province, data were analyzed using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the measurement invariance and latent mean differences of the internal and external accountability constructs across gender, tenure, school grade and teacher branches, respectively.

Teacher internal and external accountability constructs were demonstrated in this study to be fully equivalent across gender and tenure, and partially equivalent across school grade and teacher branches. Latent mean comparisons showed that less-experienced tenure teachers, class teachers and ESL teachers in Turkey felt more internally accountable compared to their peers in other groups. No significant latent mean differences of teacher external accountability were observed across genders, tenures, school types or teacher branches.

This study contributes to research by providing further valuable information on the equivalencies of the external and internal accountability constructs across gender, tenure, school grade and branch for future research studying multigroup comparisons and structural relationships of personal accountability constructs. It also provides school principals and policymakers with more accurate, multigroup comparisons of teacher external and internal accountability dispositions across gender, tenure, school grade and branch.

Everyone wants accountability in education. President Bill Clinton wanted accountability in education. In his 1999 State of the Union address, the President announced “…a plan that for the first time holds states and school districts accountable for progress and rewards them for results.” Through his proposed Education Accountability Act, President Clinton sought to insist, “…all states and school districts must turn around their worst-performing schools, or shut them down” (1999, pp. 202–203).

The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain the role of the traditional Chinese rhetoric of “conscience” in teachers’ resistance against the drive for accountability that oppresses them.

This paper first introduces increased accountability in the context of Macao and describes its impact on teachers. Following this, it presents a post-structuralist theory of teachers’ resistance as an analytical framework. A case study was conducted to illuminate how teachers employ the rhetoric of conscience to respond to the challenges raised by the prevalence of accountability.

This paper argues that the rhetoric of conscience, as the traditional paradigm, provides new insight for teachers to live a life that is different from the normality that is defined by the discourse introduced by accountability.

This paper sheds light on the role of the traditional Chinese rhetoric of conscience in teachers’ resistance in an era of accountability. In teachers’ lived experiences, the rhetoric of conscience intersects with the dominating notion of accountability and this contributes to a transitional discursive space where teachers’ resistance emerges as they negotiate or struggle with the entangled discourses.

Organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) involves discretionary behaviour advantageous to the organisation that goes beyond existing role expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between the strength of accountability and teachers’ OCB within three different management systems in which teachers are working: a system of assessment‐based accountability; a system of the gradual introduction of accountability devices; and a system with no tests or examinations.

Structural equation modelling of cross‐sectional surveys from the three different management systems was used to estimate the path coefficients and to compare the strength of relationships between concepts in the models.

The analysis shows that the factors that influence OCB in an accountability regime are clearly different from those in a regime with weak or no accountability devices.

A cross‐sectional study does not allow us to test causal relationships among antecedents of organisational citizenship behaviour. The use of self‐reported questionnaire data is another shortcoming. Furthermore, the response rates leave uncertainty about whether the samples are representative.

The strength of accountability in education governance might influence OCB among teachers. Educational administrators could benefit from exploring this issue to help the establishment of institutional arrangements.

The paper shows that OCB amongst teachers is essential for the smooth functioning of schools for several reasons.

The study integrates three strands of theories that have their focal points in employees’ perceptions of exchange: Shore's theory on employee‐organisation relationships; Bryk and Schneider's theory on trust in schools; and theories on accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which charter school leaders influence the understanding and conception of accountability policy and how that understanding translates into practice. In particular, this paper draws from sense-making theory and research on charter school leaders to identify their pre-existing understandings, their shared interactions, and their interpretations of accountability policy as they relate to professional development and instructional practices.

This paper uses the qualitative case study approach to document the organizational processes of charter schools. Data for the study were collected in two elementary charter schools over the course of 18 months. The constant comparative method was used to analyze the data because this method is compatible with the inductive, concept-building orientation of all qualitative research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two charter school leaders and twelve charter school teachers. In-depth interviews with the leaders were also conducted to gain a deeper understanding of sense-making. In addition pertinent staff meetings, professional development sessions, and informal interactions between charter leaders and teachers were observed.

While the charter school leaders in this study were inclined to adopt approaches that reinforced their pre-existing understandings, they did so using interpretative frameworks that sought to enact policies they deemed most crucial at the school level. These frameworks included metaphors and modeling, both of which reflected the policy signals received from the institutional environment. The leaders’ use of metaphors and modeling incorporated accountability policy into messages that encouraged constructive instructional practices, including data-driven analysis, project-based learning, and technology use.

This paper broadens discussions about charter school leaders and accountability in three ways. First, it explores how school leaders interpret and adapt policy signals. Second, it delineates the frameworks used by charter school leaders to identify and make sense of accountability policy. Finally, this paper highlights the ways in which charter school leaders influence the teachers in their school buildings through shared sense-making.

Despite a legacy of research that emphasizes contradictions and their role in explaining change, less is understood about their character or the mechanisms that support them. This gap is especially problematic when making causal claims about the sources of institutional change and our overall conceptions of how institutions matter in social meanings and organizational practices. If we treat contradictions as a persistent societal feature, then a primary analytic task is to distinguish their prevalence from their effects. We address this gap in the context of US electoral discourse and education through an analysis of presidential platforms. We ask how contradictions take hold, persist, and might be observed prior to, or independently of, their strategic use. Through a novel combination of content analysis and computational linguistics, we observe contradictions in qualitative differences in form and quantitative differences in degree. Whereas much work predicts that ideologies produce contradictions between groups, our analysis demonstrates that they actually support convergence in meaning between groups while promoting contradiction within groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how US school leaders make sense of external mandates, and the way in which their understanding of state and district accountability policies affects their work. It is posited that school leaders’ responses to external accountability are likely to reflect a complex interaction between their perception of the accountability policies, the state and district contexts in which those policies are situated and their own leadership beliefs and practices.

The authors use both principal and teacher survey data to explore the question of how perceptions of external policy are associated with instructional leadership behaviors. Cases of seven principals are employed to flesh out the findings from the survey analysis.

It is concluded that external accountability policy may have a positive impact on instructional leadership – where they see those policies as aligned with their own values and preferences, and where they see their district leaders as supportive of school‐driven accountability initiatives. In these cases, school leaders internalize the external accountability policies and shape them to the particular needs that they see as priorities in their own school. Where one or the other of these factors is weak or missing, on the other hand, leaders demonstrate more negative attitudes to external accountability and weaker instructional leadership.

This analysis draws on a unique, large‐scale data base and uses a mixed methods approach to answer the question.