Framing Accountability as Schools Versus Families

• In Event: Exploring the Tensions Between Teacher Professionalism and Students’ Rights During the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

Framing accountability as schools versus families
Sherman Dorn, University of South Florida

Objectives
This paper examines how the development of school accountability in the United States reinforced tensions between public schools and families, tensions that had evolved in the context of the postwar civil rights movement and an expanded discourse of rights. The objectives of the paper are to describe the competing “rights” frameworks in education policy discourse in the 1960s, the alternative frameworks at play in the early history of school accountability policies, and the reconsolidation of schools-versus-families discourse around school accountability.

Literature
The historiography of the battle over civil rights in education suggests fluidity in the construction of rights. In the legal battle over segregation before 1954, teachers were both stakeholders in civil-rights organizations and participants as plaintiffs, such as in the 1940 Alston case. In some cases, such as in the 1968 New York City teachers strike, schools and families (or teachers and families) appear to be in conflict over their definition of rights (Perlstein, 2004). In other cases, different generations emphasize different meanings of civil rights, sometimes emphasizing teachers and sometimes emphasizing students (Dougherty, 2004). That tension continued in the post-Brown era, most prominently with debates over teacher desegregation (e.g., Shircliffe, 2012). That uncertainty over rights extends more broadly to the construction of children’s rights, which witnessed postwar framing of children’s needs in tension between liberation and caretaking (Grossberg, 2012).
This paper will contribute to this literature by exploring the evolution of rights discourse in the modern history of school accountability debates. This paper will also contribute to the literature on framing in education discourse, providing an historical perspective to a literature dominated by static views of framing effects (e.g., Levin, Schneider, & Gaeth, 1998).
Methods/Data sources
This paper uses standard historical analysis of published material as a record of public debate. The data comprise the set of popular periodical pieces on student rights, teacher rights, and school accountability published in the United States between 1965 and 2005.

Conclusion/Point of View
This analysis argues that the successful imposition of test-based accountability also consolidated accountability discourse in the context of civil rights. This consolidation was not preordained at the beginning of accountability efforts but the result of a slow intersection of interests, all revolving around whom to distrust in education. In this context, teachers and teacher unions became the core of those distrusted by advocates of test-based accountability.

Significance
This paper uses a rights-discourse lens to explain how distrust of teachers became embedded in test-based accountability policy. This paper also introduces an historical component to framing analysis of education policy discourse.

Author

• Sherman Dorn, University of South Florida