In a system that increasingly stakes all on measuring success for students, teachers, and institutions against a common testable standard, we risk losing sight of the person at the foundation of our work. Patricia Carini offered a meaningful counternarrative through systematic, evidence-based documentation from observations, interviews,…

In this article, I aim to analyze the perceptions regarding excellence shared by students of high-performing public schools in Santiago de Chile and simultaneously to reflect on the way in which they experience it, inside and outside of school. Through the analysis of 24 focus groups conducted in six schools, I conclude that students share…

This essay addresses the care of the self as an important aspect in the development of educational leaders. It draws upon Michel Foucault's analysis of power and its relationship to his understanding of ethics as a practice one cultivates and takes on in the interests of leadership development. Foucault's work in these areas is timely for graduate…

The most productive way to reform education would be to invest in effective early childhood education programs. Such an investment would produce remarkable educational, social, and economic benefits. It would also transcend the current divisive debates about education reform by uniting advocates with different perspectives on issues of funding,…

Drawing primarily on interviews with a variety of teachers and other staff at a large urban Title 1 public school in California, Victoria Theisen-Homer paints an ethnographic portrait of how school personnel respond to undesirable changes. Although the school in this study, Skyline High School, had begun to thrive and most of the staff felt their…

In this essay, the authors reflect on the ongoing teacher effectiveness debate. W. David Hibler is an experienced language arts teacher, who has taught in public high schools and middle schools in Alaska, North Carolina, and New York City. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder is a historian of education who writes about schooling in the twentieth-century United…

A system of accountability in public schools predicated upon standardized testing accompanied by high-stakes consequences for leaders, as well as teachers and students, has posed a daunting challenge to educational leaders who align themselves with core tenets of progressive education. This essay explores what it might mean--and take--to stay true…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

Regrettably, accountability has largely come to mean suffering externally imposed consequences if results on simplistic, reductive measures of success are not met. Just as worrisome, this notion of accountability is internalized, deemed inevitable, and trivializes our understanding of moral accountability. This essay is an attempt to posit an…

American educators are expected to be partners in the rearing of our children, with crucial roles in children's intellectual and moral development both. We therefore must find thoughtfully balanced ways of assessing school performance and engineering school reform. In this essay, a high school principal reflects on recent accountability reforms in…

In the current climate of high stakes testing and tough love rhetoric, many educational stakeholders have become increasingly reliant on standardized test scores to determine whether or not individual students, teachers, and schools--and even entire districts and states--are successful. In contrast to the black and white picture that test-driven…