Extending the Responsibilities for Schools beyond the School Door

ABSTRACT In this article, the authors use qualitative and quantitative research to identify the performance of social actors whose decisions impact students and teachers, elucidate a set of measurements for their performance, and offer both a theoretical and research justification for these measurements. The work challenges two faulty assumptions behind the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation that make it more likely that school curricula will continue to be unrepresentative of diverse experiences and that far too many children will continue to attend schools under unnecessarily trying conditions. The first faulty assumption is the legislation’s location of school ‘problems ’ or the ‘problems with schools ’ as beginning and ending at the school door. A second assumption that the authors’ development of research-based rubrics seeks to challenge is a prevalent attitude in US society regarding individual responsibility for personal success or failure, which supports the thrust of NCLB in the public imagination. Like the ill-distribution of economic possibilities despite people’s hard work, rubrics holding the various public stakeholders in education are required to appropriately expand responsibility for student success beyond schools and teachers. There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-cit