Accountability: Antecedents, Power, and Processes

During the past decade “accountability” has emerged as the master rationale for education reform. Given its ubiquity and central role in current policy and practice, it is almost possible to forget that even 15 years ago the term was hardly ever used and accountability, in today’s sense, was virtually a nonissue. That is surprising given the certainty with which advocates claim accountability as the needle’s eye through which the camel of public education reform must pass.

How has this change come to pass? How has accountability emerged as the master rationale for contemporary education reform? How has it become the accepted justification for policies from the construction of centralized curricula, to teacher evaluation schemes based on student test scores, to government takeovers of schools that “fail to improve”?