The impact of accountability based reform on social justice education: a case study of two New York City teachers

In an era increasingly dominated by a shift towards standardization and high stakes testing in education, accountability based reforms (ABR) that are aimed at improving outcomes for students who have been historically marginalized may actually be forcing teachers to abandon culturally relevant practices that have long been thought to be an important way to equalize educational experiences and empower these very same students. While both social justice education and ABR advocate improving education for minority students, I explored whether there was additional pressure placed on social justice educators by their attempt to navigate ABR while maintaining their identities and core beliefs as social justice educators. Despite early findings that ABR limits the curriculum and focuses skills-based instruction on testing questions(see, for example, Finnegan, 2007; Rowan, 1996; Hamilton, Steecher, & Yuan, 2008; Firestone, Mayrowetz, & Fairman, 1998), standardized testing and ABR are a reality that educators must address, and social justice educators must find ways to do so while holding all students to high standards, developing critical consciousness in their students, and creating a curriculum that represents diverse knowledge and ways of knowing (Feger, 2006; Brown, 2003; Sheets, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1995). This phenomenological case study of two teachers, one in a traditional public school and one in a charter school, examined the ways that their discourses around their social justice identities were shaped by both the policy and school. Analysis of these discourses using Gee's (2011) tool demonstrated that the context in which the teacher worked, the amount of support and collaborative opportunities available, and the personal educational and racial history of the teacher all influenced the figured worlds that they developed surrounding social justice and ABR. Both teachers enacted figured worlds that represented an amalgamation of political and social goods valued by ABR and SJE. Ultimately, the discourses of these two teachers pointed to a need for less emphasis on standardized test data in evaluating teacher and student growth, more opportunities for collaboration, and greater attention in research to the ways that social justice educators can use ABR policies to support the development of social justice oriented classroom curriculum.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Amanda Dillo