Teachers' Justifications for Testing Practices as Responses to Governmentality in Accountability

• In Event: 72.064 - Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: 72.064-1 - Data, Capital, and ... Oh Yeah, Children

Abstract

In this paper I offer an examination of findings from a recently completed qualitative study conducted in the southeastern region of the U.S. that asked nine teachers at three Title I schools to explain how they designed and justified instructional practices based on their interpretations of their students’ Scholastic Achievement Test 10 (SAT 10) data. I frame the teachers’ reported practices as responses formed in the context of the governmentality undergirding current accountability testing policy. Further, I look at how teachers and school leaders appropriated a complexity of deficit thinking and meritocratic discourses along with discourses of teacher professional and experiential knowledge within the accountability context to justify these practices.

Author

• Becky M. Atkinson, The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa