The Reflection and Reproduction of the Accountability Measure: Principals' Discourse in Chicago Public Schools

• In Event: 75.014 - Making Sense of Accountability Policies: Value-Added Models and Teacher Evaluation

Abstract

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been a laboratory for privatization and school choice through a neoliberal market model put in place in the 1990s. Every year, the District rates schools based on the School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP), and those results are made public through the CPS data portal and other media outlets. Using the method and theory of critical discourse analysis (Gee 2014; Fairclough 2015), I analyzed the principals’ discourse of the CPS-run high schools rated 1+ in the 2017-2018 school year. The language principals use on their school websites’ welcome messages is used to further neoliberal symbiosis through business-classified discourses, reproduction of the SQRP language, and authoritarian discourses of power that extend beyond the school edifice.

Author

• Kelli Ann Rushek, The University of Iowa