Transparency as a Policy Technology: The Obscuring of Persistent Racial Inequities in New York City Schools

• In Event: Ethnographic Perspectives on Race and (Un)Accountability

Abstract

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), like other contemporary education policy, is predicated on devices of transparency, including standardization, categorization, and comparison. Transparency is utilized as a “technology of accountability” that holds institutions and individuals accountable to their practices—and also to the public. It aims to provide clear, technical articulations of policy problems and assessments in data (points) made widely available to the public. In the hegemonic script of transparency as a “public good,” situations of discrimination, including racism, that undergird the need for educational reform are ignored and devices of transparency aimed at meeting NCLB accountability are codified.

Objectives

We examine the purposeful and public enactment of transparency as a technology of accountability under NCLB. We interrogate the ways in which politicians, city officials, school district administrators, educational support businesspersons, and the media use the transparency of numbers to draw attention away from the ways in which NCLB negatively impacts poor, Black, and Latino youth who disproportionately attend “failing” public schools.

Theoretical Framework

We explore the purposeful and public enactment of transparency as a technology of accountability within “political spectacle” (Edelman 1988; Smith 2004). Political spectacles are political constructions of reality that “resemble theater, complete with directors, stages, casts of actors, narrative plots, and (most importantly) a curtain that separates the action onstage—what the audience has access to—from the backstage, where ‘real allocation of values’ takes place” (Smith 2004,11). Presented by the media and publically-elected officials as benefiting public good, spectacles serve to render unintelligible the ways in which they sustain inequalities and maintain power differentials.

Methodology & Data Sources

This paper emerges from an ethnographic study focused on how NCLB was localized through Children First Reforms and politically informed practices in New York City. Data was collected between June 2005 and October 2010. Data collected in 2009 and 2010 was gathered with a renewed emphasis on critical policy analysis amidst the educational politics of NYC. Data for the entire study included interviews with school administrators, staffs of educational support businesses, local elected officials, state politicians, and community groups. It also included NCLB and local policy documents, as well as publically available district data.

Results and Scholarly Significance

We reveal a paradox in which educational officials and politicians applaud transparency and justify accountability—often to reap personal and political benefit—while they minimize the legacy of racist and classist patterns of academic achievement in the city. These policy actors present NCLB as an opportunity to focus on how public education has failed minority students even though after eight years of the policy, the city’s racial achievement gap has not appreciably lessened.

Authors

• Brian Scott Kania, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Jill P. Koyama, University at Buffalo - SUNY