“It’s Personal”: School Leaders’ and Superintendents’ Meaning-Making of Accountability Policy in Alabama

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Understanding and Nurturing School Leadership (Table 19)

Abstract

The paper presents and discusses central findings of a phenomenological inquiry into school leaders’ and superintendents’ constructions of accountability and schooling in Alabama, i.e. their experiences and their meaning-making vis-à-vis federal requirements post-NCLB. It delineates how interviewees constructed the phenomenon of accountability against their horizons and in the context of their intentionality in order to understand what they view as problematic in the context of their experience and practice. Four selected themes (what they do; wrongly accounted; their standards, their accountability; it’s personal) reconstruct interviewees’ professional self-understanding. Results contribute to discussing about how to leave the accountability paradigm and align with scholarship of the past decades that calls for a refined, reasoned and reasonable system of accountability.

Author

• Christine Dr. Becks, University Duisburg - Essen