In times of scarce resources, the stakeholders in education demand that schools make their performance transparent to the outside world. National and regional school systems have been responding to this demand by developing and implementing different forms of educational accountability. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education has developed a framework for accountability in response to the following five issues: who is accountable, to whom, for what, at what level, and with what consequences. It identifies a market competition approach, a decentralized decision-making approach, and a professional and management approach. The study describes some of the accountability tools used in the member countries of the International network of Innovative School Systems (Canada, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, and Switzerland) and considers the implications for future policy and practice.
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