If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Principals face shifting accountability pressures from many sources. The most notable recent change in the USA has been the growing pressure from state and federal government. The purpose of this study is to explore the extent to which the accountability pressures experienced by principals in one American state were the same as those reported in research documenting "objective" changes in those pressures. Design/methodology/approach -This qualitative study uses interviews with New Jersey middle school principals. The purposeful sample includes principals who had been in their buildings at least three years and enhances variation on socioeconomic status (as measured by New Jersey's rating of "district factor groups") and school achievement. The authors averaged three years of achievement data and controlled for variation in poverty, ethnicity, language proficiency, and enrollment. A total of 37 principals were contacted; 25 were interviewed. Principals first rank ordered seven sources of accountability. They were then interviewed to learn why the one they ranked highest was most important. Findings -The most frequent top source of accountability was "your own conscience." Principals who selected this option highlighted a sense of personal responsibility, responsibility to the children in their charge, and how conscience mediates among competing accountabilities. Accountability to one's conscience was most prevalent in high achieving schools. Originality/value -Frequent reference to internal responsibility among leaders suggests that they continue to feel a strong sense of internal accountability in spite of increasing external pressures. It also illustrates the range of external, often conflicting pressures that principals face which include pressures from the public and the district office as well as state and federal government. In this increasingly prescriptive and contradictory environment the principal's moral code is important to her or his school.

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william a. firestone and raymond a. gonzález School districts occupy a special place in the American educational system. They are the locus of accountability to both local and state government. In recent decades, this has meant that they have a responsibility to mobilize evidence to demonstrate that students are being educated (often in a cost-effective manner). As districts grow beyond a certain size, they take on certain staff functions related to curriculum and the support of teaching, so they house experts who use evidence about student achievement to make decisions. Finally, their staff roles often extend to collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and distributing data, especially student assessment or testing data.It would be a mistake to treat districts as "unitary" users of data. Districts consist of many actors. Data may or may not be used by teachers, principals, and district-level employees. District offices themselves are divided. Decisions about what direction should be taken in a content area may be split between experts in that area and those responsible for compensatory education and for assessment, all of whom may use data for different purposes (Spillane, 1998). Moreover, board members and the public also use data.Whether and how data gets used make a difference. In an extensive meta-analysis, Black and Wiliam (1998) found that teachers' use of formative assessments in their classrooms is associated with increased student achievement. The evidence for school districts' use is less conclusive, but a recent synthesis of available research-most of it case studies-concludes that high-achieving districts invest a great deal in being able to assess student performance and use those assessments to inform decisions about what is needed to move forward at the class-

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