The Penetration of Technocratic Logic into the Educational Field: Rationalizing Schooling from the Progressives to the Present

Abstract

Context No Child Left Behind is only the most recent manifestation of a longstanding American impulse to reform schools through accountability systems created from afar. While research has explored the causes and consequences of No Child Left Behind, this study puts the modern accountability movement in longer historical perspective, seeking to identify broader underlying patterns that shape this approach to reform. Purpose and Research Design The study explores the question of the short and longer-term causes of the movement to “rationalize” schools by comparing three major movements demanding accountability in American education across the 20th century: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era; the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control. Findings This impulse to rationalize schools cannot be explained by interest group or partisan explanations since the reformers defy easy ideological categorization.. Instead, the reforms can be understood as a penetration of “technocratic logic” into the educational sphere. In each movement, this process exhibited a similar pattern: (1) the identification of a crisis of quality which destabilized the existing educational status quo; (2) the elevation of a technocratic logic, backed by the knowledge base of a high-high status epistemic community; (3) the rallying of ideologically diverse powerful actors external to the schools behind a commensurating logic that promised control over and improvement of an unwieldy school system; and (4) the inability of education to resist this technocratic logic (and often to be co-opted by it) due to teaching's historical institutionalization as a feminized, weak, bureau-cratically-administered field lacking its own set of widely respected countervailing professional standards. Conclusions/Implications This history suggests that unless teachers are able to develop and organize a stronger field, they will remain at the whim of external actors. It also suggests that top-down accountability-centered approaches are limited if the goal is to consistently produce teaching that can help students engage in higher level academic work. Rather than continuing to pursue these rationalizing strategies, this analysis and emerging international evidence suggest that a more promising approach would be to work towards professionalizing the educational field.

Leveraging portfolios in professional development for middle school science teachers' assessment and data‐use practice

“…Furthermore, many of the data-centric initiatives define what "counts" as data so narrowly that teachers have few opportunities to think about what data should be used, how they can be analyzed, and what changes can occur for students in need (Braaten et al, 2017;Horn et al, 2015). Mehta (2013) describes another, potentially more productive, framework for data use in which the development of teachers as professionals is central. Rigorous content standards are still important, but data are defined, interpreted, and acted upon in concert with developing pedagogical practice that address the findings in the data (Datnow & Hubbard, 2016).…”

“…The focus on data use over the past two decades has emerged from standards‐based accountability educational policies such as NCLB (Braaten et al, 2017; McDonald et al, 2018). These policies have advocated for rigorous content standards and accountability through standardized assessments from which decisions are made about instructional quality and, in theory, changes are made accordingly (Mehta, 2013). This model of educational data use was theorized as a way of addressing inequities among students.…”

“…Mehta (2013) describes another, potentially more productive, framework for data use in which the development of teachers as professionals is central. Rigorous content standards are still important, but data are defined, interpreted, and acted upon in concert with developing pedagogical practice that address the findings in the data (Datnow & Hubbard, 2016).…”

Professionalism and Parents: A New Frame for Color-Blind Racism in Schooling

“…In education policy, teachers are often positioned as both the key to saving public education and the reason it is failing (Buchanan, 2015). With the current continued focus on accountability, teachers are frequently framed as a critical point of intervention for improving schooling (Datnow et al, 2002; Mehta, 2013). At the same time, teachers face increased monitoring and public pressure to justify their performance (Anagnostopoulos et al, 2016).…”

Participation of Malioboro’s Parking Attendants Relocation in Right to the City Perspective

“…It means the government must think, in which the citizens are not senseless with the policy they formulated. Technocratic logic inserts people as an object of decision making and the expertise like government agencies, scholars, and planners as a subjects whom are believed know everything about the policy (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 1991;Mehta, 2013;Scott, 1999). Correlated with the production of space, the space of Malioboro is dominated by the process of perceived space which policy makers and planners are powerful in term of interpreting the space.…”