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Chapter 1 with identifiable holes
I spent a few hours writing and then more time organizing what remains to be done with chapter 1 (on the political origins of accountability) and then diving into the library for resources. So I’ll take home 10 books to read and an additional list of things to finish. But the first chunk of the […]
More on incrementalism or tinkering
Since I discussed incrementalism a few days ago, let me continue in that vein here and both praise and criticize the most prominent historians who advocate incremental school reform. Eleven years ago, David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s Tinkering toward Utopia appeared, as a short but pithy analysis of top-down school reform efforts. It was not […]
The choice of standardized testing
Last night, I was thinking about the moment in the early- to mid-1970s when state legislatures began experimenting with some form of accountability (as they then termed it, perhaps borrowing from Leon Lessinger, an associate commissioner of education in the Nixon administration). For example, Florida passed something called an accountability act in 1971, Governor Rubin […]
The politics of incrementalism
In the last few hours, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the political viability of incrementalism in school reform. Tyack and Cuban argued for it in Tinkering toward Utopia (1995), and while that’s still very popular, their argument didn’t win the day in school reform. The AYP requirements of No Child Left Behind look […]
Accountability jingoists and nihilists
I’ve been searching for a while for how to explain the Manichean-style debate we’ve been having on accountability, and I think I have it. Those who advocate for high-stakes testing as currently wrought (or who seek an intensification of it) are accountability jingoists. As with foreign-policy jingoism, accountability jingoism is belligerent in tone and identifies […]