Chapter 11: The Neoliberal Metrics of the False Proxy and Pseudo Accountability

The Obama administration entered the second term without missing a beat in its neoliberal-driven march toward creating a defacto national office of the superintendent of public schools—renewed advocacy for acceptance of Common Core State Standards, the promotion of Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers (PARCC) as a national school assessment instrument, and the August 2013 call to radically restructure higher education including an extension of Race to the Top (RTTT) accountability metrics to act as financial incentive. Any remaining hopes that Obama, as a second-term, lame-duck president, would roll back the Bush II era policies that demonize public schools and their educators in promoting corporatization and privatization in favor of a focus on equity and opportunity have again been dashed. Indeed, RTTT represents further extending the narrow view of purposeful schooling as being solely based on standardized test scores. Clearly divorced from equity as the central organizing principle for federal funding of schools, Obama’s neoliberal reform signature on the 44-billion-dollar stimulus money for schools came with Arne Duncan’s reinforcing admonition that it be used to raise standardized achievement test scores. Both RTTT and the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund’s $200 million for educator compensation were overtly linked to raising test scores and, worse, both formalized the mandating of value-added procedures to educator evaluation metrics.