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Full-Text Articles in Education
Understanding Resistance To Standardization In Education: The Tragedy Of The Commons As A Theoretical Framework, Grinell Smith, Colette Rabin
Understanding Resistance To Standardization In Education: The Tragedy Of The Commons As A Theoretical Framework, Grinell Smith, Colette Rabin
Faculty Publications
The purpose of this paper is to articulate how a theory, developed in 1968 by Garrett Hardin to describe how shared resources, or “commons” can become depleted, also elucidates the mechanism by which standardization of educational outcomes and assessment have come to dominate current education discourse. We then present results of a case study of a school struggling to succeed within a context of a district’s hyper-focus on standardized measures of success, and employ the theory to illustrate its usefulness to explain what we found at the school site. We believe this theoretical framework provides interesting perspectives on current trends …
Distortion, Disparity, And Dubious Data: The Impact Of Accountability On Instructional Practice, Curtis Jack Barnes
Distortion, Disparity, And Dubious Data: The Impact Of Accountability On Instructional Practice, Curtis Jack Barnes
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
This study examined the impact that state and federal accountability systems have had on instructional practice in two large Texas school districts by comparing the performance of students at these schools on individual items from the 2011 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) and relating performance to item difficulty and the schools' accountability risk as determined by prior accountability performance. To make this comparison, schools were placed into accountability risk groups based on past performance on the No Child Left Behind Act's (NCLB) Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) accountability instrument. The researcher then calculated the mean differences between average performance …