Chapter 6: Teaching in the Age of Accountability: Measuring History or Measuring Up to It?

I came to Michigan State University as a new faculty member in 1999, the same year the state-mandated social studies test—the Michigan Evaluation Assessment Program (MEAP)—was administered for the first time. Coming from Canada, a country that allows its teachers much more freedom than that allowed their counterparts in the United States, I was confused, if not overwhelmed by the phenomenon called the MEAP and the discourse about state standards and benchmarks that went along with it. The very idea that better practice would be achieved by regulating and monitoring teachers and holding them accountable to students’ results on unauthentic tests designed by outsiders was, in many ways, antithetical to the new social studies curriculum guide produced by Ministry of Education in British Columbia, Canada only a year before I moved south of the 49th parallel. In Canada, a more traditional curriculum was being replaced by an open-ended, thematic curriculum guide; the trend in the United States seemed very much the reverse. Indeed, trusted to make curricular choices even in light of provincial end-of-school tests, Canadian teachers appeared to have more freedom and autonomy in their classrooms than their colleagues in the United States.