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The limits of legibility: why accountability-based education reforms have not been a panacea
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Hersh, David. The limits of legibility: why accountability-based education reforms have not been a panacea. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-gfcb-y081

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TitleThe limits of legibility: why accountability-based education reforms have not been a panacea
NameHersh, David (author); Jagannathan, Radha (chair); Salzman, Hal (internal member); Sass Rubin, Julia (internal member); Gitomer, Drew (outside member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2020
Other Date2020-01 (degree)
SubjectPlanning and Public Policy, Education, Educational change
Extent1 online resource (ix, 199 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionFor over a century, reformers have sought to fix public education with an increasingly intense focus on individual accountability. The round of reforms beginning with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2003 and culminating with state-implementation of Race to the Top (RTT) initiatives over a decade later was arguably the biggest bet yet on accountability. Neither past reforms nor this latest effort has achieved the lofty goal of dramatically changing outcomes for America’s students. This dissertation aims to explain why, applying a framework derived from similar failed efforts to govern complex natural and social processes in other fields to case studies of three school districts in New Jersey. Using this framework, I argue that accountability efforts as implemented in education fail because they meet three conditions: they over-simplify the highly complex social process of educating children, they shift expertise from educators with local knowledge to distant “objective” outsiders and they ignore contextual differences between students, schools and districts. These three conditions lead to failure because they trigger at least four mechanisms that get in the way of improving outcomes. They lead to policies based on mischaracterizations of the problem that engender resistance and undermine conditions necessary for successful instruction. Given the difficulty of designing a summative accountability scheme that does not meet these three conditions of failure, a better path may require prioritizing formative efforts over summative accountability.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-gfcb-y081
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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