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Abstract
Taubman, P. M. (2009). Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. New York: Routledge.
Notes
Notes
1 With the United States having passed no major federal legislation for education since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (AESA) of 1965, the historic reauthorization of AESA through the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) redefined K–12 U.S. education through a focus on evidence‐based educational policy and classroom practice (Hess, Citation2008; Lather, Citation2010; St. Pierre, Citation2006). The crux of this policy is the assessment of school success through high‐stakes testing which holds schools, teachers, and students “accountable” by hinging school funding on test scores and graduation rates. To comply with NCLB, states have developed academic content standards that school districts use to align their courses of study with state and federal mandates. School, district, and state success is measured via student scores on a series of standardized tests and this success is made public through accountability reporting systems that disaggregate the testing data based on race, socioeconomic standing, and gender. The U.S. educational system, then, is also concerned with locating curriculums and instructional practices that promote student achievement under high‐stakes testing and utilizes an evidence‐based research framework to validate these. “Successful” curriculums are marketed to districts as the “solutions” to meeting federal standards and testing mandates.
2 See Ball (Citation1990) for a discussion of discourse analysis as empirical research.
3 Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared the separate establishment of public schools for African American and White children unconstitutional. It overturned the long‐standing 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson“separate but equal” decision that upheld racial segregation as constitutional.