Originally posted on Teachers for Education Reform website
Walk into an operating room and you won’t find the doctors worrying about legislators interfering with surgical procedures. Scientists don’t compose blog screeds about onerous accountability requirements in the lab and military officers don’t bemoan the No Soldier Left Behind Act. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for teachers. At the state and national level, policymakers have intervened in the education system with new accountability provisions numerous times, with the No Child Left Behind Act being the most famous of these.
What is it about the education system in the United States that makes it so susceptible to accountability movements? Unlike other professions, education is subject to interference from a government constantly trying to regulate practice and ensure quality–what gives?
Mehta proposes an answer to this question in Chapter Two of The Allure of Order and elaborates upon that answer in Chapter Six. Reading this argument was refreshing, to say the least; it was a welcome chance to look up from the day-to-day world of decontextualized policy debate and consider an explanation for what must be the central issue in education.
Americans, he argues in the first part of his explanation, have sky-high expectations for what schools will be able to accomplish. However, Mehta argues that this faith is accompanied by an unwillingness to confront a flimsy welfare system, high rates of child poverty and mounting levels of inequality that interfere with student achievement. As a result, we’re constantly disappointed in the quality of our schools. The governance of American schools does not help matters either, since our fragmented and decentralized system has more variance in quality and thus more opportunities for reformers to find evidence of a malfunctioning system. Finally, the teaching workforce itself is viewed as a semi-profession, which means that policymakers are unwilling to provide the resources or autonomy necessary for excellent practice. These three aspects of American schooling set it up for repeated calls for accountability from external sources.
The second part of Mehta’s explanation deals with how these calls for accountability come about. At the onset, reformers identify a crisis of quality in the education system. They search for approaches from “higher-status” fields to address the crisis. Reformers advocate for these approaches as solutions to the perceived crisis as elites within the education system adopt the logic to address the problem while the teaching profession seeks unsuccessfully to resist this change.
This model is all well and good in the abstract, but a case study between the treatement of K-12 and higher education brings it to life in Chapter Six. In Six, Mehta compares A Nation at Risk, the famous Reagan Administration call for change in the K-12 system, with Involvement With Learning, a report on higher education issues that was released in the same year. We see the K-12 report insists on serious change while the higher education report lets a few proposals loose for the consideration of higher education officials. Even the titles demonstrate the difference in approach: A Nation at Risk strides into the room with a bullhorn and a list of demands while Involvement With Learning patiently waits its turn with a cautiously phrased set of notecards. Mehta points to the contrast as evidence that the greater social capital allowed to higher education (what he calls “professional power”) meant that policymakers would defer to the higher education field. K-12, with its weaker professional power, could not resist calls for accountability.
This is an fascinating contrast, but the picture feels incomplete. While we receive an instructive account of the causes and consequences of the cultural view of K-12 education, there is much less attention paid to the field itself – advocates criticizing American schools frequently point to the jarring data about the performance of disadvantaged students and even the mediocre performance of students not struggling with poverty. However, accountability is applied to education over and over, Mehta argues, because of the unaddressed effects of child poverty, inefficient and fragmented governance and negative cultural attitudes towards the teaching institution distinguish it from other professions. Largely unconsidered is the question of whether there is something about the outcomes of K-12 schools themselves that continues to draw the attention of policymakers.
Our next post will review Chapters Three and Four, which discuss the Progressive Era and the “forgotten” standards movement.
Mac LeBuhn is a policy analyst at Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Before joining DFER, Mac was a fourth grade teacher at Rocketship Si Se Puede, a charter school in San Jose, CA. He became involved in education policy through internships at the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston.