School improvement that is reliant on accountability is a myth based upon falsehoods and wrong assumptions. Public educations' increased dependence on this foundation for school reform and change has failed both students and teachers. The fact remains that people who create education policy do not understand what is best for individual students and classrooms. Their devised curriculum standards are, in actuality, curriculum limits that prevent students from creating successful personal and academic futures because they thwart any natural learning exploration. As such, these market-inspired, externally-motivated standards limit higher-level learning. Instead of treating students and teachers as subjects to be actively engaged in learning, accountability systems treat students and teachers like objects to be manipulated by training. By presenting the lead-teach-learn triad, Eric Glover's The Myth of Accountability discusses the pitfalls of accountability systems in schools, while also investigating how schools have somehow managed to improve in spite of their negative influences. In order to evolve school reform, Glover introduces the concept of developmental empowerment in order to frame how school participants must view themselves as perpetually changing learners and systematically update school reform. Through open inquiry, Glover encourages educators to challenge the standardization and accountability practices that limit children's futures.

There is an ongoing tension in the American public education system between the values of excellence, equity, and a sustained commitment to efficiency. Accountability has emerged as a framework in education reform that promises to promote and balance all three values. Yet, this frame is often contested due to disagreements over the role of incentives and penalties in achieving desirable change, and concerns that the proposed mechanisms will have significant unintended consequences that outweigh potential benefits. More fundamentally, there is widespread disagreement over how to quantify excellence and equity, if it is even possible to do so. Accountability rhetoric echoes a broader turn toward data-driven decision-making and resource allocation across sectors. As a tool of power, accountability processes shift authority and control away from professional educators and toward policymakers, bureaucrats, and test makers. The construct of accountability is predicated on several assumptions. First, it privileges quantification and statistical analysis as ways of knowing and is built on a long history of standardized testing and data collection. Second, it takes learning to be both measurable and the product of instruction, an empiricist perspective descended from John Locke and the doctrine that knowledge is derived primarily from experience. Third, it holds that schools, rather than families, neighborhoods, communities, or society at large, are fundamentally responsible for student performance. This premise lacks a solid evidentiary basis and is closely related to the ideology of meritocracy. Finally, efforts to achieve accountability presume that market-based solutions can effectively protect the interests of society's most vulnerable, another controversial assumption. The accountability movement reflects the application of free market economics to public education, a legacy of the Chicago School of Economics in the post-World War II era. As a set of policies it was instantiated in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002, and reinforced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015. Teaching and learning are increasingly measured and quantified to enable analysis of the relationship between inputs (e.g., funding) and outputs (e.g., student performance). As has been true in other sectors when data-driven surveillance and assessment practices are introduced, outcomes are not always as expected. It is unclear whether this data push will promote equality of opportunity, merely document inequality, or perhaps even increase racial and socioeconomic segregation. Furthermore, little is understood about the costs of increased assessment on the health and success of students and teachers, externalities that are rarely measured or considered in the march to accountability. States will need to generate stakeholder buy-in and think carefully about the metrics they include in their accountability formulas in order to balance mandates for accountability, the benefits that accrue to students from preserving teacher autonomy and professionalism, the social good of equal opportunity, and public calls for transparency and innovation.

This book examines the idea of educational accountability in higher education, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make colleges better? What if educational accountability tools don’t actually measure what they’re supposed to? What if accountability data isn’t valid, or worse, what if it’s meaningless? What if administrators don’t know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can’t measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. What if students don’t learn much in college? What if higher education was never designed to produce student learning? What if college doesn’t help most students, either personally or economically? What if higher education isn’t meritocratic, actually exacerbates inequality, and makes the lives of disadvantaged students even worse? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.

With social and digital media reshaping the way business is conducted, and the number of companies embracing the new social medium, this book revisits CSR practices from a digital perspective. The volume explores the impact and influence of the new 'social' on responsibility and its feasibility, measurability and success in a boundary-less world.

From Simon & Schuster, Success and Betrayal offers the groundbreaking insight into the myth of the unlimited potential, the mystique of power, and the elusive path to the top. In their hard hitting book, two successful corporate managers describe a classic series of "landings" that women must confront both to thrive in the corporate environment and to achieve a guiltless balance between career and personal life.

The leading police leadership text as used by the internationally renowned Bramshill UK (now also known as Centrex) to train police senior command officers worldwide. A KEY WORK IN THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF POLICE LEADERSHIP What are the special challenges of police leadership? What can be learnt from leadership theory in general? To what extent is police leadership in permanent crisis? In Police Leadership in the Twenty-first Century the editors have brought together a collection of authoritative and innovative contributions to show that: leadership is less of a mystery than is often supposed much mainstream leadership theory can be adapted to police leadership the qualities required by police leaders can be developed by education and training. The book looks at the extensive research on the topic and concludes by suggesting certain simple but fundamental rules ñor ëGolden Rulesí - for police leaders.

The Neoplatonists have a perfectionist view of freedom: an entity is free to the extent that it succeeds in making itself good. Free entities are wholly in control of themselves—they are self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing. Neoplatonist philosophers argue that such freedom is only possible for non-bodily things. The human soul is free insofar as it rises above bodily things and engages in intellection, but when it turns its desires to bodily things, it is drawn under the sway of fate and becomes enslaved. Ursula Coope discusses this notion of freedom and its relation to questions about responsibility. She explains the important role of notions of self-reflexivity in Neoplatonist accounts of both freedom and responsibility. In Part I, Coope sets out the puzzles Neoplatonist philosophers face about freedom and responsibility and explains how these puzzles arise from earlier discussions. Part II explores the metaphysical underpinnings of the Neoplatonist notion of freedom (concentrating especially on the views of Plotinus and Proclus). In what sense, if any, is the ultimate first principle of everything (the One) free? If everything else is under this ultimate first principle, how can anything other than the One be free? What is the connection between freedom and nonbodiliness? Finally, Coope considers in Part III questions about responsibility, arising from this perfectionist view of freedom. Why are human beings responsible for their behaviour, in a way that other animals are not? If we are enslaved when we act viciously, how can we be to blame for our vicious actions and choices?

The social construction of crime is often out of proportion to the threat posed. The media and advocacy groups shine a spotlight on some crimes and ignore others. Street crime is highlighted as putting everyone at risk of victimization, while the greater social harms from corporate malfeasance receive far less attention. Social arrangements dictate what is defined as crime and the punishments for those who engage in the proscribed behavior. Interest groups promote their agendas by appealing to public fears. Justifications often have no basis in fact, but the public accepts the exaggerations and blames the targeted offenders. The net-widening effect of more laws and more punishment catches those least able to defend themselves. This innovative alternative to traditional textbooks provides insightful observations of myths and trends in criminal justice. Fourteen chapters challenge misconceptions about specific crimes or aspects of the criminal justice system. Kappeler and Potter dissect popular images of crimes and criminals in a cogent, compelling, and engaging manner. They trace the social construction of each issue and identify the misleading statistics and fears that form the basis of myths—and the collateral damage of basing policies on mythical beliefs. The authors encourage skepticism about commonly accepted beliefs, offer readers a fresh perspective, and urge them to analyze important issues from novel vantage points.

This book examines the theory, law, and reality of preemption choice. The Constitution's federalist structures protect states' sovereignty but also create a powerful federal government that can preempt and thereby displace the authority of state and local governments and courts to respond to a social challenge. Despite this preemptive power, Congress and agencies have seldom preempted state power. Instead, they typically have embraced concurrent, overlapping power. Recent legislative, agency, and court actions, however, reveal an aggressive use of federal preemption, sometimes even preempting more protective state law. Preemption choice fundamentally involves issues of institutional choice and regulatory design: should federal actors displace or work in conjunction with other legal institutions? This book moves logically through each preemption choice step, ranging from underlying theory to constitutional history, to preemption doctrine, to assessment of when preemptive regimes make sense and when state regulation and common law should retain latitude for dynamism and innovation.