How High-Stakes Testing and Accountability Policies Helped Manufacture a New Generation of Efficiency Experts

• In Event: 35.045 - The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses — Revisiting Larry Cuban's Book 15 Years Later

Abstract

The wisdom from Cuban’s The Blackboard and the Bottom Line is as relevant today as it was in 2004. The data behind his analyses were extensive; his explanations were cogent; his cautionary notes were prescient. Yet policymakers, and much of the American public, looked the other way.

Today, public schools are even more reliant on market models of governance than in 2004. How, despite Cuban’s and others’ warnings about the limitations of business-driven practices for public sectors, did Americans come to widely accept private sector principles to steer public institutions? Federal and state education policies, and the elite networks of actors who advance them, provide important explanations.

Cuban’s teachings came at a time when schools were just beginning to experience the next wave in school reform: high-stakes accountability. Test scores were already the accepted bottom line. Since then, however, a new generation of reformers advanced test scores’ centrality not just as one measure of effectiveness, but as indicators of schools’ overall purpose. Since 2004, attention to civic, socio-emotional, and other purposes of schools has largely waned.

This presentation is based on the authors’ research on school reform organizations and the actors who lead them. It examines the ways in which high-stakes policies manufactured a hidden market (Burch, 2009) for today’s school improvement agencies, and it draws on critical policy studies to frame these agencies’ behaviors amid a discourse of managerialism in the public sector. The presentation illustrates how prominent reform organizations enact managerial data monitoring systems as core drivers of their reforms; how they frame leadership and teaching as reductive, managerialist pursuits; and why their reliance on business-inspired logics enable them to thrive in a school reform marketplace. In this way, it shows how today’s reformers behave in ways that resemble the early “efficiency experts,” and how two decades of high-stakes policy consequences for schools secured their niche as key players in a competitive, profit-driven industry.

The presentation features research on Teach For America alumni’s political influence –another factor that helps explain the proliferation of modern-day efficiency experts that Cuban’s historical analyses illuminate. By analyzing TFA alumni’s career paths, the presentation demonstrates how TFA promotes even more pronounced business models of educational leadership than those Cuban observed in 2004, ones that frame the roots of inequality in primarily managerial terms, that support “superhero” solutions to complicated educational problems, and that minimize attention to humanistic and civic concerns. The presentation shows how the majority of TFA alumni embrace principles of competition, fierce individualism, and charismatic leadership – values often ascribed to successful business leaders. Importantly, it demonstrates how TFA’s alumni leverage powerful networks to promote business-oriented, high-stakes policies that reinforce business values and secure their positions as influential policy entrepreneurs.

Author

• Tina M. Trujillo, University of California - Berkeley