Global perspectives on high-stakes teacher accountability policies: An introduction

Abstract

The aim of this special issue, “Global Perspectives on High-Stakes Teacher Accountability Policies”, is to provide insights into a diverse set of policies focusing on teachers’ accountability, including the underpinning ideas and cultural and socio-economic contexts of these policies, as well as their effects on teachers’ work, the teaching profession and the broader educational environment. While these articles highlight the influence of the “global testing culture” on education systems world-wide, they also demonstrate the need for understanding accountability systems as context-specific. As such, we urge scholars to consider the social, historical, political and geographical contexts within which their research is situated and to promote a research agenda that looks at the specific responses and effects that accountability policies produce in different regulatory settings. This introductory article, first, clarifies the main focus and conceptual framework of the special issue and, second, presents an overview of the papers included in the issue and their main contents.

Improving instructional practice through peer observation and feedback: A review of the literature

“…Teacher evaluation reform has spanned the globe (see the special issue, Global Perspectives on High-Stakes Accountability Policies in Education Policy Analysis Archives guest edited by Holloway, Sørensen, & Verger, 2017). In the United States, 2009 was a particularly transformational year in teacher evaluation reform as Race to the Top (RTTT) was launched.…”

Exploring the effect of supportive teacher evaluation experiences on U.S. teachers’ job satisfaction

“…We would argue, as others have, that this holds true for the teaching profession (Hargreaves, 2010;Zeichner, 2010) and by extention, teacher evaluation policy and practice. While district, state, and national teacher evaluation policies may espouse the importance of the benefits to teachers of evaluation (see, e.g., U.S. Department of Education, 2009, Race to the Top, Great Teachers and Leaders subsection D, Part 5), in practice high-stakes, top-down, teacher evaluation reflects an increasing prioritization of the needs of the educational organization for control and certainty over the needs of teachers to feel supported in their learning and development as practitioner-professionals (Holloway & Brass, 2017;Holloway, Sørensen, & Verger, 2017). These shifts have implications for teacher satisfaction, as we will discuss a bit later, because the characteristics of occupational professionalism are those historically that have been the primary sources of attraction and retention within teaching (Cohen, 2011;Lortie, 1975;Taylor & Tashakkori, 1995;Scott, Stone, & Dinham, 2001;Shen et al, 2012).…”

Logics of accountability: Cross-national patterns in school-level controls

“…Research has shown that accountability is a global phenomenon in education policy and permeates individual societies despite its conceptual ambiguity and complexity (Dubnick, 2014;Holloway, Sørensen, & Verger, 2017;Thiel & Bellmann, 2017). In school settings, a broad framing of accountability has been often understood as the process or mechanism that assure schools meet their intended goals (Rothman, 1995).…”

“…In school settings, a broad framing of accountability has been often understood as the process or mechanism that assure schools meet their intended goals (Rothman, 1995). Increasing accountability discourses in education policies has given rise to rigorous standards of evaluation for school management processes, utilizing standardized assessments for student achievement, and instituting incentives and sanctions for teachers, schools, and districts (Holloway, Sørensen, & Verger, 2017;Ingersoll & Collins, 2017). In the United States, the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and its revised version, Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), are representative examples of accountability policies, a phenomenon that has spread internationally (Brewer, Knoeppel, & Lindle, 2015;Holloway et al, 2017;Lee & Amo, 2017;Rizvi & Lingard, 2009;Sahlberg, 2010).…”

“…In addition, researchers have empirically shown that there are multiple ways to achieve accountability across education systems internationally (e.g., Dorn & Ydesen, 2015;Klein, 2017;La Londe, 2017;Lim, 2016;Maroy, Pons, & Dupuy, 2017;Rasmussen & Zou, 2014;Thiel & Bellmann, 2017). Findings from these studies indicate that accountability policy implementation remains multifaceted depending on the context (Holloway et al, 2017;Klein, 2017), and therefore, the logics behind the implementation of accountability can differ based on historical backgrounds and structures of the education system. For example, some countries historically generated centralized decision-making processes in their overall education systems, while others valued decentralized decision-making processes within schools-using either test-based incentives to shape local decisions or clear professional/curricular standards to move education towards very specific national/regional goals.…”