Mimicking Successful Reform: A Postcolonial Analysis of Teachers’ Perceptions of High-Stakes Accountability

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Policy and the Everyday Lives of Teachers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers’ perceptions of and experiences with high stakes accountability. Through qualitative inquiry I sought to investigate how teachers made sense of and responded to high stakes accountability policies that were intended to impact their work. Informed by critical and postcolonial perspectives, I contextualize these reforms as emerging from conflicted historical tensions and within the neoliberal project to remake schools. Drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha to analyze the study’s data, I argue that the processes of colonization, both as metaphors and as ways to connect U.S. school reform to globalization and neo-colonization, form a useful framework for considering the implications of high stakes accountability reform.

Author

• Angela Leigh Masters, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign