Straight A’s: Achievement, Accountability, and Adult Anxieties in Federal Educational Reform, 1979–2002

• In Event: Racial Equity, Justice, and Democratic Education in the United States

Abstract

Using newly collected records across three archival data sources, this paper explores how federal education reform acted as a vessel for social and epistemic (re)production in response to national concerns about spatial organization, public health, and labor, from the Education Department’s establishment (1979) to No Child Left Behind (2002). Concerns emerged as racialized moral panics about teenagers’ engagement with sex, drugs, and crime and shaped the development of standards-based policies by government officials, education and management “experts,” and civic organizations. I posit the preservation of a racial-sexual order as a driver and shaper of achievement and accountability policies; underlying political coalitions, adults’ anxieties structured children’s access and relation to knowledge about bodies, identities, and desires.

Author

• Andrew Stein, Northwestern University