School accountability has been a part of public education conversations since the development of No Child Left Beyond (NCLB) in 2001. These accountability policies were developed with a core mission of holding schools, districts, and states accountable to the academic growth and achievement of all students and all student groups, and for the last…

The United States has been consumed with disappointing levels of student performance compared to other countries for several decades. In 2009, in an effort to close the achievement gap, the U.S. Department of Education authorized a program to support States under The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Authorized under the ARRA of 2009,…

The paper utilizes the fundamental components of social capital theory. It assesses a hypothesis that higher levels of social capital result in benefits for professional development of pedagogy in higher education institutions' faculty. A year-long study was conducted that offered faculty training in increasing critical thinking skills in…

This article offers a new approach to quality, focusing on the dimensions that gather around it. The mismatched goals of controlling and improving higher education continue to trouble the conceptual clarity of accountability. Quality in higher education emerges as something agreed upon (to varying efficacy) through accountability measures, rather…

This brief summarizes "Comparability in Balanced Assessment Systems for State Accountability," published in "Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice" (Evans & Lyons 2017). The study evaluated comparability claims in local scoring of performance assessments across districts participating in New Hampshire's Performance…

It is a time of disruption, in politics and government, in many national economies and cultures. In the United States, disruption has also penetrated the accreditation space, with debates and differences about student achievement, access and affordability and transparency, topics also challenging quality assurance around the world. Higher…

The WSU Extension Scholarly Writing Group (ESWG) is a one-year faculty development mentoring program designed to support faculty on tenure or promotion track. The ESWG was created in response to increased expectations for Extension county-based faculty to contribute to the scientific literature within their fields through peer-reviewed…

Over the past 20 years, the ethos of academic entrepreneurialism has significantly influenced the Hong Kong higher education sector. As entrepreneurialism is an increasingly popular restructuring strategy for Hong Kong universities, they have begun to shift their paradigms from purely upholding the mission of research and teaching to the third…

Assessment of student learning is typically undertaken with at least two goals in mind, accountability and improvement. This dichotomy of purpose has dogged assessment from the outset (Ewell, 2009) and contributed to conflicted or incomplete ends. As Banta and Palomba (2015) concluded, assessment undertaken primarily to comply with accountability…

Creativity is a commonly used word in education circles, yet it is also seen as something that is being undermined by contemporary agendas of standards, testing and an increasingly strong focus on core subjects that are used as indicators of school performance, which are impacting the work of teachers. This paper starts from Ball's 2006 paper 'The…

We examined the influence of accountability on the consistency of peer ratings and quality of peer feedback by comparing three conditions: only rating accountability, only feedback accountability, or both rating and feedback accountability. From a large undergraduate course, 287 students' peer ratings and peer feedback were coded for rating…

This fact sheet presents the graduation and dropout rates in Alaska for school years 2004-2005 to 2016-2017. The graduation rate methodology reflects a federal mandate requiring all 50 states to use a uniform graduation rate that is to be reported for all public high schools in the country. This rate, known as the "Four Year Adjusted Cohort…

Federal law requires states to develop systems to hold K-12 schools accountable for the outcomes of all students. This includes using data to illuminate how historically marginalized groups of students, including English Learners (ELs), are disadvantaged by systems that fail to meet their distinct needs. But for this to be useful for school…

Decades of chronic underfunding and inequitable funding have been spiraling Pennsylvania's public school system into crisis--failing kids and threatening the future of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth Court has ruled that the state's current funding system for K-12 schools is unconstitutional and the state must take action to adequately and…

Decades of federal and state education legislation enacted to increase student academic achievement and enhance school quality have pronounced impacts on teachers and their instructional practice. That impact is captured in the term intensification. Intensification is multifaceted and manifests as additional tasks accomplished simultaneously, with…