When it comes to the issue of US education reform, hopeful politicians, liberal and conservative alike, have long touted the promises of 'standards-based accountability'. But do accountability based reforms actually work? What happens when they encounter the formidable challenge of the comprehensive high school? The New Accountability explores the current wave of assessment-based accountability reforms at the high school level in the United States.

"Standard-based accountability" has become a consistent buzzword emanating from the mouths of hopeful politicians-liberal and conservative-for almost twenty years. But does accountability work? The New Accountability explores the current wave of assessment-based school accountability reforms, which combine two traditions in American education-public accountability and student testing.

Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human capital management, resource allocation, and accountability and performance improvement systems to support an overarching strategy. This central idea provides a valuable conceptual framework for current and future school leaders. The case studies presented in Managing School Districts for High Performance grow out of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a unique partnership between the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a network of urban school districts. This rich array of cases explores the managerial challenges districts face as they seek to ensure rich learning opportunities and high achievement for all students across a system of schools.

Walk into any school in America and you will see adults who care deeply about their students and are doing the best they can every day to help students learn. But you will also see a high degree of variability among classrooms-much higher than in most other industrialized countries. Today we are asking schools to do something they have never done before-educate all students to high levels-yet we don't know how to do that in every classroom for every child. This book is intended to help education leaders and practitioners develop a shared understanding of what high-quality instruction looks like and what schools and districts need to do to support it. Inspired by the medical-rounds model used by physicians, the authors have pioneered a new form of professional learning known as instructional rounds networks. Through this process, educators develop a shared practice of observing, discussing, and analyzing learning and teaching.