Editors' Introduction to the Politics of Accountability: Challenges in Retrospect

This collection reports the outcomes of an international policy research project from 1994 to 1997 that was concerned with how power is being used in education to construct and discharge obligations between stakeholders, and to suggest how such processes might better serve educational ends. Research was commissioned and gathered that examined how the politics of education at site and systemic levels have been contributing to the reconstruction of accountability policies in an international policy context, a context characterised by conceptual disarray, multiple reform strategies, blunt administrative instruments, and plural political cultures. The primary finding of the project is that a responsible politics of accountability are needed at all levels to reconnect the processes and criteria of accountability to learning, teaching, leading, and governing. Such educative politics can both bestow legitimacy and generate improvement.