ABSTRACT Test-based accountability or ‘TBA,’ as a core element of the pervasive Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), has become a central characteristic of education systems around the world. TBA often comes in conjunction with greater school autonomy, enabling governments to assess ‘school quality’ (i.e. test results) from a distance. Often, quality improvement is further encouraged through the publication of these results. Research has investigated this phenomenon and its effects, much of it focusing on Anglo-Saxon cases. This paper, drawing on expert interviews and key policy documents, couples a policy borrowing with a policy instruments approach to critically examine how and why TBA has developed in the highly autonomous Dutch system. It finds that TBA evolved incrementally, advancing towards higher stakes for schools and boards. Further, it argues that school autonomy has been central to the development of TBA in two ways. Firstly, following a period of decentralisation that increased school(board) autonomy, the Dutch government saw a need to strengthen accountability to ensure education quality. This was influenced by international discourse and accelerated by a (politically exploited) national ‘quality crisis’ in education. Secondly, the traditionally autonomous Dutch system, shaped by ‘Freedom of Education’, has at times conflicted with TBA, and has played a significant role in (re)shaping global policy and in mitigating the GERM. 相似文献
This article provides a “thick” understanding of how public school parents understand their decision to opt their children out of standardized tests. In it, Amy Shuffelton draws from qualitative research interviews with Chicago parents to explore how three mothers connected opting out of standardized testing to their broader commitments to public schools. In probing the democratic potential of their logic, Shuffelton points to avenues of hope for democratic and equitable public schooling. As scholars have argued on multiple grounds, public schools have generally preserved inequitable power relations and resource allocations rather than changed them, and this happens in part because of parental resistance to reforms they believe to be detrimental to the interests of their children. Precisely because privileged parents have and implement the power to use schooling to pass advantages to their own children, however, it is important to consider when and why some of these parents instead see reason to build a public school system that shares those advantages widely. Putting these parents' explanations for opting out of testing into conversation with ideas about the democratic public in texts by John Dewey and Bonnie Honig, Shuffelton finds potential pathways, as well as hurdles, to reviving commitment to public schooling. 相似文献
Background: Student voice agendas have been slow to permeate higher educational institutions. Curricula in universities, like those in primary and secondary education, are still usually made for students by teachers who, while they may have the best interests of the students in mind, rarely if ever engage students in curriculum decision-making. The need for more equitable, dialogic and democratic engagement by students is particularly relevant in the context of teacher education. It has been argued that pre-service teachers should experience democratic practices during their teacher education experiences in order to have the confidence, knowledge and skills to support democratic opportunities in schools.
Purpose: Through the participatory action research project described in this paper we sought to position pre-service teachers as pedagogical consultants who would design feedback strategies, gather feedback with faculty and co-construct physical education teacher education (PETE) curricula. We saw this process as a democratic possibility that might create opportunities for pre-service teachers to critique and transform their own educational experiences. In this paper we detail the process we used to support dialogue about teaching and learning between students and faculty members and draw on the perspectives of the students, pedagogical consultant, lecturer and teaching and learning advocate involved in this project.
Participants and setting: The project was undertaken with one cohort (77) of pre-service teachers during the final year of a four-year undergraduate PETE programme in an Irish university and focuses on the democratization of one PETE course.
Data collection: Data were generated with and by the pre-service teachers, the pedagogical consultant, the lecturer and the regional teaching and learning advocate. The primary data collection methods were interviews and observation.
Data analysis: The data were reviewed repeatedly looking for patterns, themes, regularities, paradoxes, variations, nuances in meaning and constraints [Rubin and Rubin 1995. Qualitative Interviewing. The art of Hearing Data. London: Sage]. The authors coded all data sets independently using constant comparison [Glaser 1965. “The Constant Comparative Method of Qualitative Analysis.” Social Problems 12 (4): 436–445] and then shared their processes and subsequent codes. Our analysis engages Greene’s [1988. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press] dialectical theory, to explore how naming and holding the tensions involved in this research and pedagogical enterprise was not stultifying but generative.
Findings: Three key dialectics were constructed from the data: student–teacher, critical reflection–learning and responsibility–accountability. We speak to each of these themes from the perspectives of the students, the pedagogical consultant and the lecturer who participated in this project.
Discussion and conclusion: Our discussion turns to the challenges and benefits associated with the pursuit and realization of democratic possibilities in PETE. 相似文献
