This book addresses how to scale-up and sustain effective forms of leadership development over long enough periods of time to realize the positive effects on large numbers of students of improved school leadership.
Leadership is second only to classroom instruction as an influence on student achievement. Strong leadership can potentially unleash latent capacities that already exist in an organization.
A recent study estimates that the number of schools who miss the AYP mark will more than double to 5,000 schools in 2009-2010.
In times of scarce resources the stakeholders in education--students, parents, employers, and the community at large--demand that schools make their achievements clear to the outside world. National and regional school systems have been responding to this demand by developing and implementing different forms of educational accountability. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education has developed a framework for understanding educational accountability in response to the following five who is accountable, to whom, for what, at what level, and with what consequences? It identifies four the market competition approach, the decentralized decisionmaking approach, the professional, and the management approach. The book describes some of the accountability tools used in the member countries of the International Network of Innovative School Canada, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, and Switzerland, and considers the implications for future policy and practice.