Chapter 1: The Stress of Accountability: Teachers as Policy Brokers in a Poverty School

This chapter describes how a group of teachers managed accountability stressors while teaching at a low-income school. Stressors were evident when teachers managed conflicts between expected curricular and accountability outcomes and their own diagnoses and professional expectations of students’ needs. This chapter examines the reasoning and rationales behind the decisions of a small group of teachers to modify, or broker, expected accountability outcomes.