The will to accountability: Reforming education through standardized literacy testing (Ontario)

I utilize analytic concepts of governmentality (Foucault, 1991a) and methodological approaches of genealogy (Foucault, 1984a) and critical ethnography (Britzman, 2000; Tamboukou Ball, 2003) to attend to the following questions: How has accountability become a rationality for reforming education, and how is it operationalized through the technologies of the OSSLT? How are those who inhabit schools governed---organized, classified, or normalized---by the arrangements, processes, and performances of the OSSLT? How are subjectivities produced under the conditions of this reform, and how do individuals come to understand or 'know' themselves and others in the terms of the test?This study explores how accountability policy has operated discursively to shape the understandings, practices, and social relations of public education in Ontario over the past decade. Specifically, it examines the lived effects of accountability reform by focusing on the school-level practices of the large-scale, standardized Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT). Through an analysis of Ontario policy documents, I examine how the notion of accountability emerged intertextually, how it was solidified in a certain problem-solution formulation, and how it ascended as a rationality for education in Ontario. I detail the ways in which the abstract concept of accountability was realized through multifarious technologies for assembling and implementing Ontario's program for literacy testing. Through a micro-narrative account of how accountability 'worked' in one urban high school, I then focus on the effects of the reform. I show how the OSSLT installed a knowledge-practice cycle of preparation and remediation where certain performances were enacted and certain modes of subjectification were introduced. I argue that subjectivities were both made available and 'made up' through the work of accountability, and I trace how students, teachers, and administrators found it possible, or not, to think and talk about themselves and others in the terms and categories that were provided by the OSSLT. Finally, I argue that the work of the self on the self and others (Foucault, 1988, 1990) involved complicated ways of becoming and 'being' and produced paradoxical inclusion/exclusion effects (Popkewitz, 1998) that contribute to the uneven and inequitable conditions of Ontario's school system.

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