Constructing and Consuming the Accountable Education

• In Event: 52.034 - Doing Critical Policy Analysis in Education

Abstract

The culture of accountability that predominates educational policy in the USA (Webb, 2011; Suspitsyna, 2010) illustrates a “governance turn” (Ball, 2009, p. 537), where society is governed less by institutions of government and more by self-governance. Stoker (2004) called this constrained discretion (p. 166) and explained that the local actor’s good judgment becomes the lever of change through policy rather than particular rules. In this paper, we investigate what it means to be accountable in a policy framework that operates through constrained discretion. We do so by providing a model of the use of historical methods in the production of critical policy analysis, focusing on accountability culture that is partially constituted by education policy. Specifically, we argue that our methodological approach contributes to the study of policy in two ways: (a) it helps reveal how, overtime, policy normalizes affective subjectivities; and (b) our methodology also documents how people tactically “consume” the policy discourse of accountability (Poster, 2004 p. 410). We illustrate this approach by creating a cultural history of accountability within the USA educational policy context and combine this with microhistories of various actors who live out being accountable.

Authors

• Curtis Anthony Brewer, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Amanda Bell Werts, Appalachian State University