The New Politics of Accountability

Abstract

This article describes the origins and goals for this special double issue of Educational Policy, which also represents the 2013 Politics of Education Association Yearbook. We provide an overview of each of the articles that comprise this issue and discuss key themes concerning the new politics of accountability that emerge when we consider the articles collectively. These themes include (a) accountability policy has expanded the number and diversity of political actors; (b) accountability policy has contributed to shifts in traditional alliances; (c) political actors are using traditional and new strategies to influence and respond to accountability policy; (d) accountability policy has altered institutional structures and norms, shifting the distribution of power and resources; (e) accountability policy creates more accountability policy; and (f) the focus on performance- or test-based based accountability has contributed to a decline in democratic accountability.

Problems and challenges for the Politics of Education before the change of prominence experienced by educational actors

“…If the Accountability Policy has altered the Politics of Education (Jacobsen & Young, 2013), exactly the same can be said about what is a product of the former: the new ways to assess the results obtained by students. As shown on the preceding pages, educational assessment affects the whole school institution; nevertheless, this paper will only refer to something which many scholars see as a serious problem of PE: its governance by numbers.…”

Educational Policy Implementation Revisited

“…However, since the publication of these collective works, there has been a plethora of implementation research on educational policies enacted and implemented within a dramatically different context than scholars addressed in these edited volumes, notably the high-stakes accountability era (see Jacobsen & Young, 2013 for the politics of accountability), an emphasis on scaling-up programs, and federal funding of specific programs. Indeed, over the past decade many politics of education scholars have examined the implementation of school, district, and state-level programs and policies resulting from the enactment of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.…”

“…This manuscript is especially timely because in this era of heightened accountability (Jacobsen & Young, 2013), principals are attempting to move beyond managing learning environments to shaping how learning occurs in school settings. The results in Implementation of a Districtwide Policy to Improve Principals' Instructional Leadership: Principals' Sensemaking of the Skillful Observation and Coaching Laboratory show that largely due to (a) SOCL's clear and easy to understand design which essentially focused on teacher talents-research-based strategies to improve learning-and coaching sessions; (b) first-rate professional development; (c) principals' desires to be instructional school leaders; and (d) principals' confidence in the effectiveness of the SOCL program, principals implemented SOCL with some fidelity.…”

The Politics of K–12 Local Control Funding and Accountability for Latinx and ELL Students: Lessons Learned From California

“…Accordingly, policies are viewed as both explicit and implicit expressions of values and a discursive process entwined in a complex web of ideologies and diverse political actors (see Diem, Young, & Sampson, 2019;Edelman, 1971;Malen, 2006;Scribner & Layton, 2003). Moreover, this lens is a departure from conventional examinations of education policy that focus on whether such systems work to more broadly include issues of governance, power relations, and values (see Jacobsen & Young, 2013). Using the politics of education as our overarching theme, this issue examines California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and interrogates the ways in which policy directives and implementation practices reconstitute structural forms of oppression.…”