Exploration of Possible Individual and Institutional Effects on School Accountability Pressures and Teacher Responses

Abstract

To meet the demands of knowledge economy, educational systems worldwide have developed many accountability mechanisms to hold the schools responsible for a standardized teaching and account-giving for the results. Henceforth, this research seeks to portray the accountability pressures on schools and school responses, and their variations between the groups of individual and institutional variables in Turkish context. A survey research design investigated the data obtained by the ‘Accountability Pressures Scale’ and ‘Accountability Responses Scale’ from the stratified sample of K-12 schools, in Kütahya, Turkey. It revealed that teachers feel very less pressure from school shareholders, school social environment and upper bureaucracy, and they feel responsible only to the upper bureaucracy and supervisors. The level of accountability relations variates between the subgroups of teacher characteristics such as school level, gender, position, union membership and education level of teachers have an impact on.