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By Kathryn A. McDermott
Functionality responsibility has been the dominant pattern in schooling coverage reform because the Nineteen Seventies. country and federal guidelines set criteria for what scholars should still research; require scholars to take "high-stakes" exams to degree what they've got realized; after which carry scholars, faculties, and college districts responsible for their functionality. The objective of those guidelines is to push public college districts to make sure that all scholars succeed in a typical threshold of data and skills.
High-Stakes Reform analyzes the political tactics and historic context that ended in the enactment of state-level schooling responsibility rules around the kingdom. It additionally situates the schooling responsibility circulation within the broader context of public management study, emphasizing the relationships between fairness, responsibility, and intergovernmental kin. The ebook then makes a speciality of 3 in-depth case stories of coverage improvement in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Kathryn McDermott zeroes in at the such a lot arguable and politically charged sorts of country functionality responsibility sanctions, together with commencement assessments, direct nation intervention in or ultimate of colleges, and country takeovers of faculty districts.
Public debate casts functionality responsibility as both a therapy for the issues folks public schooling or a harmful mistake. Kathryn McDermott expertly navigates either side of the talk detailing why specific guidelines turned renowned, how the assumptions at the back of the rules motivated the types they took, and what practitioners and students can study from the successes and screw ups of schooling responsibility rules.
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Extra resources for High-Stakes Reform: The Politics of Educational Accountability
Sample text
Perhaps staff members have not noticed that a performance problem exists, but once it is brought to light through measurement, they will be able to address it. Or perhaps they are shirking their responsibilities and choosing not to address a performance problem they already know about, in which case the threat of being sanctioned for poor performance will shock them out of their complacency. In either case, no additional resources or adjustments in workload will be needed. There is theoretically no reason why ambitious performance targets could not be combined with increased resources; as we will see later in the book, performance-based accountability in education often does accompany increased funding for at least some school districts.
Chapter 3 begins the story of how that idea evolved, and how it shaped educational accountability policy. C H A P T E R - T H R E E The Evolution of Educational Accountability T he forms that accountability policies take—who is accountable to whom for what—depend on the larger political context in which the policies are situated. This context generates the “institutional conditions” and “expectations” identified by Romzek and Dubnick as the forces that shape accountability (1987). To get a sense of the institutional conditions and expectations that shape educational accountability, consider Ms.
The design of GPRA assumes agencies with stable histories and “manageable” levels of conflict among external actors, but state agencies involved in intergovernmental programs “do not have agreement on data categories or indeed on the legitimacy of the federal government’s requests for information” (Radin 1998, 310). When state and local officials perceive accountability mandates from “above” as efforts to limit their autonomy, they are generally perceiving the situation accurately. Electorally independent state and local officials are often “reluctant partners,” as Robert Stoker titled his book on federal policy implementation (Stoker 1991).