The Infrastructure of Accountability: Data Use and the Transformation of American Education

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.

Dorothea Anagnostopoulos is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. She earned her PhD in education from the University of Chicago, where she also earned an MAT/English. Her research crosses several domains, including educational policy, urban education, teacher education, and classroom discourse, and has been widely published in journals such as Research in the Teaching of English, Discourse and Society, Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the American Educational Research Journal. Her policy research uses a cultural sociological perspective to examine how teachers and students make sense of educational accountability policies and how such policies shape the distribution of resources, opportunities, and social identities in urban high schools. She is coauthor with Kenneth K. Wong, Francis Shen, and Stacey Rutledge of The Education Mayor (Georgetown University Press, 2007). Anagnostopoulos taught high school English in rural, suburban, and urban schools prior to receiving her doctorate.

Rebecca Jacobsen is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Rebecca received a PhD in the politics of education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her dissertation, entitled “Priorities in Public Education: An Analysis of Elite and Popular Opinion on the Goals of Public Education,” received a 2007 dissertation fellowship award from the Spencer Foundation. Her work focuses on the ways in which public opinion is shaped by school accountability data. She has published articles in Public Opinion Quarterly, American Education Research Journal, and Education Finance and Policy. She is coauthor with Richard Rothstein and Tamara Wilder of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Teachers College Press, 2008) and with Martin Carnoy, Larry Mischel, and Richard Rothstein of The Charter School Dust Up (Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, 2005). Jacobsen taught in the New York City Public School system prior to earning her doctorate.

Stacey A. Rutledge is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at Florida State University. She received a master’s in teaching social studies from Brown University and a doctor of philosophy in education from the University of Chicago. Her research explores how policies at multiple levels of the school system aimed at improving teaching and learning, such as test-based accountability and teacher quality, shape the work of district and school administrators and teachers, and, ultimately, students’ learning opportunities. Rutledge is currently serving as a lead investigator for the National Center for Research and Development on Scaling Up Effective Schools, which is aimed at identifying the policies and practices of effective high schools. Her research has been published in American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record, and Leadership and Policy in Schools. She also taught high school social studies in Chile and Massachusetts before beginning her doctoral degree.