The Ideology of Educational Accountability

Abstract

“A ccountability” is a key figure in neoliberalism, linking the drive for cost cutting to a moral framework that puts the state and the public on the defensive. Appeals to this framework frequently serve as the grounds for the implementation of the regime of austerity described in the previous chapter. Within education, accountability names, at the same time, a complex assessment-based institutional apparatus that governs more and more of the life of schools. The links between the regime of educational accountability and the broader political and economic transformation of society ushered in by neoliberalism have been much discussed.¹ Within neoliberalism, social and human activity is thought to be most effectively and rationally organized when it is brought within the literal or figural structure of the capitalist market. Demanding a reconstruction of social relationships on the basis of competition and efficiency, neoliberalism expects public life generally, and education in particular, to understand its principal elements and activities either as inputs or as products whose value has to be demonstrated on the basis of quantitative and standardized measures. In the case of for-profit educational ventures, this subsumption of teaching and learning by the market is quite literal.