Editorial for issue 3

Abstract

This issue of the journal contains three articles on assessment instruments and one on policy implementation. In the first article Lars G. Bjork and Joseph Blase investigate one of the links between government and schools within the in the major educational reform No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the USA. One of the aspirations of the NCLB was to make teachers and schools accountable for student learning and thus to make school districts and schools more active in implementing the reform. In this study Bjork and Blase explore the case of one school district and ways in which new consortia, a new superintendent and a number of middle managers worked on implementing the reform through distributing leadership and using a Total Quality Management model in the school district and in schools. An important feature of the school district reform was that middle managers, like deputy superintendents, had to implement new structures and practices that could eventually make their own position redundant. The case study demonstrates that the people who are responsible for implementing policies are very powerful political agents and thus very powerful in forming policies. The middle leaders never implemented all parts of the school district reform. This result may cause politician to reflect on implementation methods when they have decided on a policy and then want it implemented through local, school district layers. Politicians are, of course, the agents who make politics, but may have to reconsider how to get politics implemented because practitioners at all levels are not necessarily guided by the same interests as the politicians are. One practitioner interest may be not to make their own job redundant. In the second article Francis L. Huang and Tonya R. Moon examine the relations between teacher characteristics and student achievement in low performing schools in the USA. They question traditional knowledge and evidence as to teachers’ experiences, Educ Asse Eval Acc (2009) 21:191–193 DOI 10.1007/s11092-009-9079-x