ERIC Number: EJ1448000
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Jan
Pages: 39
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0895-9048
EISSN: EISSN-1552-3896
The Accountability Paradigm Post-NCLB: Policy Ideas and Moral Narratives
Educational Policy, v39 n1 p235-273 2025
For decades, policymakers in the U.S. have leveraged accountability policy as a governing tool to lift school performance and close the achievement gap. Accountability become so widespread that it arguably became a "policy paradigm" with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002. Yet after just 13 years of implementation, policymakers replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which gave states more control over the policy tools and mechanisms to regulate school improvement. This qualitative project captured the evolution of the accountability paradigm by studying the policy ideas and moral narratives of policy elites in California and Tennessee during the transition period between NCLB and ESSA. The study finds that interview participants legitimized the core design features of ESSA, but attached their underlying worldviews and beliefs to the flexible design features, which created unique accountability models with different institutional arrangements.
Descriptors: Accountability, Educational Legislation, Federal Legislation, Elementary Secondary Education, Educational Policy, Educational Research, Ethics, Politics of Education, School Culture
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2993
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: California; Tennessee
Identifiers - Laws, Policies, & Programs: No Child Left Behind Act 2001; Every Student Succeeds Act 2015
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A