Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

False Premises: The Accountability Fetish in Education

2009; Wiley; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

0193-4872

Martha Derthick, Joshua M. Dunn,

School Choice and Performance

She took math and reading workbooks home so her children were always ahead in school. And she insisted on discipline and chores to teach the importance of accountability. (1) --The New York Times on Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mother Accountability has become the mantra of education reform in the United States. During the presidency of George W. Bush, it was also the guiding principle of intergovernmental relations, according to a little-noticed essay in the 2002 Economic Report of the President. Setting out his presidency's approach to federalism, it said that [t]his Administration seeks to create an institutional framework that will encourage the development of measurable standards to which all providers of public services--Federal and local public and private--can be held accountable. (2) In federal policy for elementary and secondary education, which is susceptible to management through grants-in-aid to state and local governments, measurable standards became an explicit statutory goal, not to say an obsession. In policy for higher education, measurable standards began to glimmer in the federal government's eyes as well, but because of the greater legal and organizational variety--and because the bulk of federal aid goes to students as grants and loans rather than directly to colleges and universities--federal regulation of higher education is quite problematic politically. The Bush Administration's effort to revise federal regulations on accreditation in higher education stirred a firestorm of opposition and was blocked in Congress. I. NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND Bipartisan education reform will be the cornerstone of my President Bush said in a position paper sent to Congress only a few days after his inauguration. (3) He had campaigned on education reform, repeatedly promising a regime of annual testing, which was the practice in Texas. (4) As governor, he claimed credit for the improved performance of students there. (5) This presaged a much deeper federal government intervention in K-12 education, yet President Bush's critique of America's schooling was not new. During the Reagan Administration, A Nation at Risk (6) had raised alarm about the performance of students in the United States as compared with those of other nations. There was also concern over the achievement gap at home between white and minority students. Nor was President Bush's proposed remedy original: Preceded by state governments, the national government had been advocating through content standards and testing. (7) But the national government had been moving only gradually. The Improving America's Schools Act (IASA), (8) a 1994 renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), (9) nudged rather than compelled the States toward adoption of standards and testing. As the ESEA came up for renewal again in 1999, several bills from different political perspectives sought to define a more effective accountability regime, but were never enacted. (10) The advent of the Bush Administration brought several changes, first among them education's greater salience as a political issue. Education had unpredictably shot to the top of the public's concerns in the 2000 election, and President Bush had made education central to his campaign. This was especially noteworthy given that the Republican Party had in the recent past favored a federal retreat from K-12 education. In party postmortems following Senator Bob Dole's loss to President Bill Clinton in 1996, however, then-Governor Bush had argued that this retreat was an error, and that Republicans would benefit from embracing a more compassionate, and hence more activist, conservatism. (11) President Bush's election led to a convergence between Republicans and Democrats on a need to deploy federal government power more aggressively vis-a-vis state governments and their local school districts. …