The Politics of Accountability

Throughout the conservative/liberal debate on education culture-driven differences that drive the ideologies of American politics as “an accepted framework” that defines “the primary purpose of schooling” exists. The ability for the American student to succeed is based in economically driven values perpetuated by both national and global competition (Spring, 2011). The model for high-stakes testing and its position in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was based in mythical results of then-Texas Governor George H. W. Bush’s “Texas (Houston) Miracle” campaign as the presidential “Education Candidate” of 2000. When he became president, Bush “brought with him former Houston Superintendent of Education Rod Paige to be Secretary of Education. He also brought the "Texas miracle" — [who] supposedly increased test scores attributed to Texas' strict accountability system,” but  “before the end of Bush's first term, Paige would leave in disgrace, thanks to revelations of cooked scores, forced-out students, and other barely legal means of inflating test results” (Brown, Gutstein & Lipman, Spring 2009). Eight years after its implementation, CBS reporter Dan Rather uncovered a story of lies as the failure of the model was revealed by a Houston assistant principal (Leung, 2011). At the 2011 annual American Association of School Administrators (AASA) conference, educational historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, Diane Ravitch, spoke of the punitive repercussions caused by a law and its mandates based on this myth. She stated that “we have a federal law punishing teachers, closing schools, based on a myth, to put it politely” (Ravitch, 2011).

I find it extremely troublesome that history repeated itself as Arne Duncan, the former Chicagoan “chief executive officer” was brought onboard as Secretary of Education under Barack Obama. As a private sector businessman, Duncan was the CEO of the Chicago school system and brought to his new position a legacy of his many accomplishments in bridging achievement gaps and providing high quality education to every child. However, as Brown, Gutstein, and Lipman (2009) posit:

the biggest threat to finally achieving equitable and quality education in Chicago's low-income African American and Latino/a schools is not the individual who carries out the policy but a system of mayoral control and corporate power that locks out democracy. The impact of those policies includes thousands of children displaced by school closings, spiked violence as they transferred to other schools, and the deterioration of public education in many neighborhoods into a crisis situation.

Connections that connect

Sophocles, Orwell, Shakespeare, Beowulf (not an author), Bradbury, Lowry, Chaucer, Angelou, Dickenson, Harper Lee, Emerson, Anaya, anything in the Bible which is only taught when allusions are present, the connects to Homer and mythology as well as scientific discoveries, great painters, the pyramids, Illuminati, mathematic equations, my life.

Critical thinking includes me?

References

Brown, J., Gutstein, E., & Lipman, P. (2009). Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story: Myth or reality. Rethinking Schools, 23(3). Retrieved from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_03/arne233.shtml

Ravitch, D. (February 23, 2011). Diane Ravitch at NCE 2011 part 1 [Online video]. AASAVideoCenter. Retrieved, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvstR3Bkh4c

Spring, J. (2011). The politics of American education. New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.