School accountability and standard-based education reform: The recall of social efficiency movement and scientific management

Abstract

This study examines issues of success/failure, performance, and effectiveness in the contemporary reform discourses of school accountability. It pays attention to a particular meaning of success/failure and its implications for current public school systems and education reform movements, not merely as a school accountability issue, but as an ontological one, which is inscribed in the politics of inclusion and exclusion. The mechanisms of standardization, classification, and normalization embedded in the practices of high-stakes testing are reconsidered through an analysis of the discussion of social efficiency in the early twentieth century. The study also examines its recall several decades later as part of the quality control and management of individuals, schools, and states. In exploring connectedness between the old and new levels of social efficiency, this study suggests that success/failure becomes reinscribed as a particular system of reasoning to normalize the subjectivity in discourses of the current American education reform and OECD’s PISA. The study concludes by criticizing the rationale of recent educational reforms based on the search for past and present social efficiency movements in schools.