The Essential School Board Book highlights effective practices that are common to high-functioning boards around the country--boards that are working successfully with their superintendents and communities to improve teaching and learning.

Providing a comprehensive introduction to the topic of accountability and datafication in the governance of education, the World Yearbook of Education 2021 considers global policy dynamics and policy enactment processes. Chapters pay particular attention to the role of international organizations and the private sector in the promotion of performance-based accountability (PBA) in different educational settings and at multiple policy scales. Organized into three sections, chapters cover: the global/local construction of accountability and datafication; global discourse and national translations of performance-based accountability policies; and enactments and effects of accountability and datafication, including controversies and critical issues. With carefully chosen international contributions from around the globe, the World Yearbook of Education 2021 is ideal reading for anyone interested in the future of accountability and datafication in the governance of education.

Beginning with the earliest efforts to regulate schools, the author reveals the rationale behind accountability and outlines the historical development of how US federal and state policies, accreditation practices, private-sector interests, and internal requirements have become so important to institutional success and survival

Governing multi-level education systems requires governance models that balance responsiveness to local diversity with the ability to ensure national objectives.

This book addresses current changes of education policies in a context of globalisation. It does so by focusing on the implementation of performance-based accountability policies in France and in Quebec (Canada). It questions the trajectory of these policies, their mediations and their instrumentation in various territories and schools through a theoretical framework which combines a North American neo-institutionalist approach with the perspective of the French sociologie de l’action publique. The book extends the current international literature on English-speaking experiences of hard accountability to research on “soft” accountability policies and proposes a deep investigation in two highly contrasted education systems. This investigation is multilevel and has led to field research both in schools, in intermediate authorities, and in central administrations for three years. The research presented in the book addresses the international literature on accountability in public administration and in education, the current transformations of governance in education, as well as the forms taken by the globalisation of education policies in countries differently exposed to international influences. The comparison highlights a convergent neo-statist trajectory of the performance-based accountability policy in the two countries, various forms of governance by results enacted at the local and meso level, and more intense impacts of these policies on schools and teacher’s practices in Quebec than in France.

Reviews recent lessons about decentralized governance and implications for future development programs and policies.