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School improvement that is reliant on accountability is a myth based upon falsehoods and wrong assumptions. Public educations' increased dependence on this foundation for school reform and change has failed both students and teachers. The fact remains that people who create education policy do not understand what is best for individual students and classrooms. Their devised curriculum standards are, in actuality, curriculum limits that prevent students from creating successful personal and academic futures because they thwart any natural learning exploration. As such, these market-inspired, externally-motivated standards limit higher-level learning. Instead of treating students and teachers as subjects to be actively engaged in learning, accountability systems treat students and teachers like objects to be manipulated by training. By presenting the lead-teach-learn triad, Eric Glover's The Myth of Accountability discusses the pitfalls of accountability systems in schools, while also investigating how schools have somehow managed to improve in spite of their negative influences. In order to evolve school reform, Glover introduces the concept of developmental empowerment in order to frame how school participants must view themselves as perpetually changing learners and systematically update school reform. Through open inquiry, Glover encourages educators to challenge the standardization and accountability practices that limit children's futures.
Freedom of choice is at the core of the American story. But what if choice is fake?Americans are fixated on the idea of choice. Our political theory is based on the consent of the governed. Our legal system is built upon the argument that people freely make choices and bear responsibility for them. And what slogan could better express the heart of our consumer culture than "Have it your way"?In this provocative book, Kent Greenfield poses unsettling questions about the choices we make. What if they are more constrained and limited than we like to think? If we have less free will than we realize, what are the implications for us as individuals and for our society? To uncover the answers, Greenfield taps into scholarship on topics ranging from brain science to economics, political theory to sociology. His discoveries—told through an entertaining array of news events, personal anecdotes, crime stories, and legal decisions—confirm that many factors, conscious and unconscious, limit our free will. Worse, by failing to perceive them we leave ourselves open to manipulation. But Greenfield offers useful suggestions to help us become better decision makers as individuals, and to ensure that in our laws and public policy we acknowledge the complexity of choice.
There is an ongoing tension in the American public education system between the values of excellence, equity, and a sustained commitment to efficiency. Accountability has emerged as a framework in education reform that promises to promote and balance all three values. Yet, this frame is often contested due to disagreements over the role of incentives and penalties in achieving desirable change, and concerns that the proposed mechanisms will have significant unintended consequences that outweigh potential benefits. More fundamentally, there is widespread disagreement over how to quantify excellence and equity, if it is even possible to do so. Accountability rhetoric echoes a broader turn toward data-driven decision-making and resource allocation across sectors. As a tool of power, accountability processes shift authority and control away from professional educators and toward policymakers, bureaucrats, and test makers. The construct of accountability is predicated on several assumptions. First, it privileges quantification and statistical analysis as ways of knowing and is built on a long history of standardized testing and data collection. Second, it takes learning to be both measurable and the product of instruction, an empiricist perspective descended from John Locke and the doctrine that knowledge is derived primarily from experience. Third, it holds that schools, rather than families, neighborhoods, communities, or society at large, are fundamentally responsible for student performance. This premise lacks a solid evidentiary basis and is closely related to the ideology of meritocracy. Finally, efforts to achieve accountability presume that market-based solutions can effectively protect the interests of society's most vulnerable, another controversial assumption. The accountability movement reflects the application of free market economics to public education, a legacy of the Chicago School of Economics in the post-World War II era. As a set of policies it was instantiated in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002, and reinforced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015. Teaching and learning are increasingly measured and quantified to enable analysis of the relationship between inputs (e.g., funding) and outputs (e.g., student performance). As has been true in other sectors when data-driven surveillance and assessment practices are introduced, outcomes are not always as expected. It is unclear whether this data push will promote equality of opportunity, merely document inequality, or perhaps even increase racial and socioeconomic segregation. Furthermore, little is understood about the costs of increased assessment on the health and success of students and teachers, externalities that are rarely measured or considered in the march to accountability. States will need to generate stakeholder buy-in and think carefully about the metrics they include in their accountability formulas in order to balance mandates for accountability, the benefits that accrue to students from preserving teacher autonomy and professionalism, the social good of equal opportunity, and public calls for transparency and innovation.
This book examines the idea of educational accountability in higher education, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make colleges better? What if educational accountability tools don’t actually measure what they’re supposed to? What if accountability data isn’t valid, or worse, what if it’s meaningless? What if administrators don’t know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can’t measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. What if students don’t learn much in college? What if higher education was never designed to produce student learning? What if college doesn’t help most students, either personally or economically? What if higher education isn’t meritocratic, actually exacerbates inequality, and makes the lives of disadvantaged students even worse? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.
Accountability is not a way of doing. Accountability is a way of thinking. Those who achieve greatness know true accountability makes all the difference between success and failure. Based on extensive interviews with accountable leaders—from Fortune 500 CEOs to Hall of Fame athletes—No More Excuses identifies the five accountabilities of successful people and organizations. These tenets encourage accountability in others and performance at the highest level. When you willingly accept and embrace the five accountabilities, you encourage accountability in others and empower your teams to achieve at the highest level. The result is an organization focused on its fundamental values and committed, at the individual level, to achieving critical strategic goals. Whether you are a business owner, a top executive, or a team leader, accountability starts with you and trickles down to everyone else. If you want to build an organization that achieves its goals and beats the competition it is time for No More Excuses.
Elements of Effective Governance: Measurement, Accountability and Participation is one of the first books to explore the relationship between accountability, government performance, and public participation. It discusses two main assumptions: greater accountability leads to better performance; and the more the public is involved in the measu
Meritocracy is often mentioned in discussions of social inequality, stratification, oppression and "White Privilege," but it is seldom investigated as to its ubiquitous role as a dominant inaugurator of social inequality in America today. Emanating from the central liberal concept that opportunities to compete for resources and goods are fair and equal for everyone, the American social justice ideal of "meritocratic equality" masks the realities of group determinants in relation to the anatomies of "hegemonies of power" in American culture. Disingenuously deflecting inequality issues from institutional inefficacy onto individual inadequacies and obfuscating fundamental issues of injustice, America's "meritocratic myth" camouflages meritocratic individualism's role as a catalytic agent behind group differential practices in America's social, political and economic architecture. This discursive analysis critiques the puissant connections between meritocratic individualism (meritocracy) and the conceptions and practices of dominant "Americanized" identities, ideology and institutions. It particularly brings into focus the ways meritocracy legitimizes practices of social inequality, especially within the institution of public education. Meritocracy is examined through the lens of myth, as an abstracted ideology whose "universal" tenets have become habituated through uncontested religious, social, psychological and historical processes, which this paper explores. Critical Race Theory provides the analytical framework to examine supposedly "neutral" principles of the "fair" and "good" society in relationship to widely accepted principles of merit, ability, performance and "deservedness." In particular, education's "accountability-consciousness" is deconstructed to expose this politically motivated, euphemistic ploy in perpetuating surveillance/containment practices that recreate racial, social and cultural stratifications, while deftly casting pathology onto the individual, rather than institutional policy and practice.
A New York Times Editors’ Choice and Best Book of the Year at TIME, Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, and Electric Literature Jeannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare since she was a teenager. It is always about him: one of her closest high school friends, a boy named Mark. A boy who raped her. When her nightmares worsen, Jeannie decides—after fourteen years of silence—to reach out to Mark. He agrees to talk on the record and meet in person. Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own. Unflinching and courageous, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships—a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions, push towards deeper understanding, and continue a necessary and long overdue conversation.
Achievement tests play an important role in modern societies. They are used to evaluate schools, to assign students to tracks within schools, and to identify weaknesses in student knowledge. The GED is an achievement test used to grant the status of high school graduate to anyone who passes it. GED recipients currently account for 12 percent of all high school credentials issued each year in the United States. But do achievement tests predict success in life? The Myth of Achievement Tests shows that achievement tests like the GED fail to measure important life skills. James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, Tim Kautz, and a group of scholars offer an in-depth exploration of how the GED came to be used throughout the United States and why our reliance on it is dangerous. Drawing on decades of research, the authors show that, while GED recipients score as well on achievement tests as high school graduates who do not enroll in college, high school graduates vastly outperform GED recipients in terms of their earnings, employment opportunities, educational attainment, and health. The authors show that the differences in success between GED recipients and high school graduates are driven by character skills. Achievement tests like the GED do not adequately capture character skills like conscientiousness, perseverance, sociability, and curiosity. These skills are important in predicting a variety of life outcomes. They can be measured, and they can be taught. Using the GED as a case study, the authors explore what achievement tests miss and show the dangers of an educational system based on them. They call for a return to an emphasis on character in our schools, our systems of accountability, and our national dialogue. Contributors Eric Grodsky, University of Wisconsin–Madison Andrew Halpern-Manners, Indiana University Bloomington Paul A. LaFontaine, Federal Communications Commission Janice H. Laurence, Temple University Lois M. Quinn, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Pedro L. Rodríguez, Institute of Advanced Studies in Administration John Robert Warren, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities