The ongoing attempts to measure educational quality, to hold schools responsible for their performance against these measures, and to use the resulting data to design improvement initiatives have yet to yield the promised results. A universal definition of "good education" seems to elude our grasp. Despite broad public support for…

The authors begin this essay by sharing excerpts taken from two events at their own liberal arts institution. One was from an opening convocation in 1967, and the second from an accreditation visit in 2014. The two episodes have been presented in order to illustrate the major differences in the ways university experiences have been thought about…

Gert Biesta contends that managerial accountability, which focuses on efficiency and competition, dominates the current political arena in education. Such accountability has influenced states' developments of test-based teacher evaluations in an attempt to quantify teachers' efficacy on student learning. With numerous state policies requiring the…

If a teacher instructs with greater attention to improving students' performance in order to protect her employment rather than solely to advance knowledge or character, is she acting immorally? This question has historical roots in Socrates's famed animosity toward the sophists. Socrates maintained that sophistic teaching was immoral because the…

In this address, the author builds the case that a new political economy of education, dominated by what Pauline Lipman calls the "neo-liberal social imaginary," is changing the moral context in which educators imagine their professional roles. The author argues that educators are placed in relation to others in rather complicated…

Henry A. Giroux claims this to be the "worst of times" for US public education. Not alone in this judgment, numerous other scholars stand in agreement with him. These thinkers view the current corporate/accountability/testing movement, with its iron grip on public school policies, as disfiguring and disparaging the US system of public…

In this article, the author responds to the Presidential address, "Ethics for the New Political Economy: What Can It Mean to Be Professionally Responsible?" in which Michael G. Gunzenhauser defines, names, and proposes a professional ethics for educators: an ethics of the everyday. The author introduces her response by stating that…

In "Laggards, Morons, Human Clinkers, and Other Peculiar Kids," Robert Osgood takes the readers back to a pivotal moment in the development of American public schools, a time when schools were just starting to be held accountable for seeing to it that children progressed through the system efficiently. As a result of Ayres study, which was…