Rationing education in an era of accountability

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 87, Issue 10, 2006, Pages 756-761

  Booher Jennings, Jennifer ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745744669     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003172170608701010     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. My use of the phrase "educational triage," as well as the title of this article, draws on the work of David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell, Rationing Education: Policy, Practice, Reform, and Equity (Buckingham, U.K.: Open University Press, 2000).
2. Like Ted Sizer's Horace Smith, Mrs. Dewey is not one informant whom I encountered during an ethnographic study of an urban elementary school in Texas. Instead, she is a representative amalgam of the school's teachers. My study included 71 interviews - 34 with teachers and administrators and 37 with students - in addition to 180 hours of participant-observation. Some of the findings discussed here were initially reported in Jennifer Booher-Jennings, "Below the Bubble: 'Educational Triage' and the Texas Accountability System," American Educational Research Journal, vol. 42, 2005, pp. 231-68.
3. Julie B. Cullen and Randall Rebeck, "Tinkering Towards Accolades: School Gaming Under a Performance Accountability System," Working Paper, University of California, San Diego, 2006;
4. David N. Figlio and Lawrence S. Getzler, "Accountability, Ability, and Disability: Gaming the System," Working Paper 9307, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002, www.nber.org/papers/w9307;
5. and Brian A. Jacob, "Accountability, Incentives, and Behavior: The Impact of High-Stakes Testing in the Chicago Public Schools," Working Paper 8968, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002, www.nber.org/papers/w8968.
6. Walt Haney, "The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education," Education Policy Analysis Archives, 2000, epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41;
7. Linda M. McNeil, "Faking Equity; High-Stakes Testing and the Education of Latino Youth," in Angela Valenzuela, ed., Leaving Children Behind: How "Texas-Style"Accountability Fails Latino Youth (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 57-112.
8. Linda M. McNeil and Angela Valenzuela, "The Harmful Impact of TAAS Testing in Texas: Beneath the Accountability Rhetoric," in Gary Orfield and Mindy L. Kornhaber, Raising Standards or Raising Barriers? Inequality and High-Stakes Testing in Public Education (New York: Century Foundation, 2001), pp. 127-50.
9. Linda M. McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: The Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (London: Routledge, 2000).
10. Brian A. Jacob and Steven Levitt, "Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating," Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 118, 2003, pp. 843-77.
11. Booher-Jennings, Quarterly Journal of Economics, op. cit.;
12. Gillborn and Youdell, Quarterly Journal of Economics, op. cit.;
13. "Making AYP: Cause to Celebrate?," Philadelphia Public School Notebook, Winter 2004, www.thenotebook.org/editions/2004/winter/editorial.htm;
14. Joel Rubin, "Are Schools Cheating Poor Learners?," Los Angeles Times, 28 November 2004, p. B-1;
15. Daniel White, Dara Wexler, and Juliette Heinz, "How Practitioners Interpret and Link Data to Instruction: Research Findings on New York City Schools' Implementation of the Grow Network," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, 2004;
16. and Katie Weitz White and James Rosenbaum, "Inside the Black Box: Sociological Mechanisms Affecting Professional Deviance, Student Classification, and School Culture," in Allan R. Sadovnik et al., eds., No Child Left Behind and the Reduction of the Achievement Gap: Sociological Perspectives on Federal Education Policy (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
17. Michael W. Apple, Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 71.
18. Jennifer Booher-Jennings and Andrew A. Beveridge, "Who Counts for Accountability? High-Stakes Test Exemption in a Large Urban School District," in Sadovnik et al., Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality op. cit. All analyses of Houston data mentioned in this article derive from this paper.