The Infrastructure of Accountability

Data Use and the Transformation of American Education

Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, Stacey A. Rutledge, Rebecca Jacobsen, Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, Stacey A. Rutledge, Rebecca Jacobsen

• Publisher: Harvard Education Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781612505312
• eBook ISBN: 9781612505336
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Infrastructure of Accountability brings together leading and emerging scholars who set forth an ambitious conceptual framework for understanding the full impact of large-scale, performance-based accountability systems on education.

Over the past 20 years, schools and school systems have been utterly reshaped by the demands of test-based accountability. Interest in large-scale performance data has reached an unprecedented high point. Yet most education researchers focus primarily on questions of data quality and the effectiveness of data use.

In this bold and thought-provoking volume, the contributors look beneath the surface of all this activity to uncover the hidden infrastructure that supports the production, flow, and use of data in education, and explore the impact of these large-scale information systems on American schooling. These systems, the editors note, “sit at the juncture of technical networks, work practices, knowledge production, and moral order.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction. Mapping the Information Infrastructure of Accountability
• Part I. Building the Infrastructure of Accountability
• Part II. The Infrastructure of Accountability in Districts, Schools, and Classrooms
• Part III. The Infrastructure of Accountability and the Public Good
• Conclusion. The Infrastructure of Accountability: Tensions, Implications, and Concluding Thoughts
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index