This book offers important insights into the complex nature of educational accountability and its role in supporting school improvement. By developing two key concepts - educational accountability and American federalism - the book highlights various types of accountability that take place in different institutional settings.
By moving beyond the long-standing, test-based, administrative approach to accountability, the author demonstrates how professional, market, and political accountability affect teaching, learning, and educational policymaking. The book examines four accountability types: administrative accountability, professional accountability, market accountability, and political accountability. The volume questions why these accountability types vary in their development and use across the country, and considers how American federalism - national, state, and local - provides different political arenas with variation in ideas, interests, and institutions that prompt di
