Educational Accountability and the Role of International Large-Scale Assessments

Abstract

As nations across the world have experienced globalization and an increasingly competitive economy, calls for governments to monitor public sector functions, including education systems, have grown. As a result, educational evidence-based policymaking and outcomes-based accountability have emerged in recent decades as global phenomena. Evidence-based policymaking is the use of information, such as program effectiveness or differential achievement of different groups of students, to make policy decisions. Outcomes-based accountability is a specific type of evidence-based policymaking that uses data on the effectiveness of each unit in a given system – such as each school in a school system or each teacher in a school – to make decisions about that particular unit. Though accountability systems have been a controversial approach for providing consumers – policymakers, parents, and the public – with information needed to determine how well public education systems are educating their students, they have a long-standing presence in many nations. In the United States, outcomes-based accountability has played a core role in federal education policies following the introduction of state accountability systems in the 1990s, and a host of other countries have had centralized reporting of national standardized exams for several decades (Mizala et al., J Dev Econ 84(1):61–75, 2007).