Limits to democratic schooling and trust in an era of high-stakes accountability

Democratic schooling, by its very nature, depends upon a significant degree of trust between teachers and school administrators, among teachers, and between teachers and students.  However, the Standards-based School Accountability Movement in American education that grew out of the 1983 federal report A Nation at Risk in the Reagan administration and has continued through the “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001” in the Bush administration and “Race to the Top” in 2009 in the Obama administration calls for external accountability and high-stakes testing.  This system of externally-imposed accountability assumes that some outside agent needs to hold accountable the individuals who, if left to their own efforts, would fail to perform their jobs adequately.  External accountability systems are therefore premised on a hierarchy of distrust. The public and federal policy makers do not trust the states that in turn do not trust the school districts that in turn do not trust their schools, principals, teachers, and ultimately students. The distrust becomes reciprocal. Distrust militates against democratic practices in school by diminishing the willingness of school administrators to accept input from teachers on school policy or curricular issues and limits student participation in subject matter content or instruction, which is then replaced by an emphasis on rote memorization and the so-called “drill and kill” preparations for high-stakes tests.  In a hierarchy of distrust actors focus on the appearance of desired learning outcomes and not necessarily the actual attainment of the substance of those learning outcomes.  The actors often “game the system” (Dworkin 2008). Using more than 30 years of survey data on thousands of students, teachers, and administrators collected by the senior author the paper will examine how increasingly more rigorous accountability has diminished acceptance of democratic schooling, increased teacher burnout, and exacerbated distrust.