"The Infrastructure of Accountability" brings together leading and emerging scholars who set forth an ambitious conceptual framework for understanding the full impact of large-scale, performance-based accountability systems on education. Over the past 20 years, schools and school systems have been utterly reshaped by the demands of test-based accountability. Interest in large-scale performance data has reached an unprecedented high point. Yet most education researchers focus primarily on questions of data quality and the effectiveness of data use. In this bold and thought-provoking volume, the contributors look beneath the surface of all this activity to uncover the hidden infrastructure that supports the production, flow, and use of data in education, and explore the impact of these large-scale information systems on American schooling. These systems, the editors note, "sit at the juncture of technical networks, work practices, knowledge production, and moral order." This book is divided into three parts. Following a foreword by Jeffrey R. Henig, and an introduction by Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, Stacey A. Rutledge, and Rebecca Jacobsen, Part 1: "Building the Infrastructure of Accountability" begins with the following chapters: (1) The Paradoxes of Data-Driven School Reform: Learning from Two Generations of Centralized Accountability Systems in the United States (Heinrich Mintrop and Gail L. Sunderman); (2) Trust and Numbers: Constructing and Contesting Statewide Student Information Systems (Dorothea Anagnostopoulos and Juanita Bautista-Guerra); (3) The Accidental Revolution: Teacher Accountability, Value-Added, and the Shifting Balance of Power in the American School System (Chris Thorn and Douglas N. Harris); and (4) Money and Measures: The Role of Foundations in Knowledge Production (Janelle Scott and Huriya Jabbar). Part 2: "The Infrastructure of Accountability in Districts, Schools, and Classrooms" continues with: (5) Governing with Data:The Role of Independent Review Panels in Urban Districts (Kenneth K. Wong); (6) "The Numbers Speak for Themselves": Data Use and the Organization of Schooling in Two Florida Elementary Schools (Stacey A. Rutledge and Brenda Gale Neal); (7) New Data, Old Patterns: The Role of Test Scores in Student Assignment (Lora Cohen-Vogel, La'Tara Osborne-Lampkin, and Eric A. Houck); (8) What Makes a "Good" School? Data and Competing Discourses in a Multilingual Charter Network (Lisa M. Dorner and Angela B. Layton); and (9) Technologies for Education and Technologies for Learners: How Information Technologies Are (and Should Be) Changing Schools (Richard Halverson and R. Benjamin Shapiro). Part 3: "The Infrastructure of Accountability and the Public Good" closes with the following chapters: (10) Test Scores, Accountability, and Inequality in American Education (Jennifer Jennings and Heeju Sohn); and (11) Do Good Grades Matter? Public Accountability Data and Perceptions of School Quality (Rebecca Jacobsen and Andrew Saultz). The book ends with a Conclusion: The Infrastructure of Accountability: Tensions, Implications, and Concluding Thoughts (Stacey A. Rutledge, Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, and Rebecca Jacobsen). An index is provided.