ABSTRACT
The enduring legacy of Ross Perot’s school reforms in Texas is not merely the strengthening of bureaucratic controls at the expense of teaching and learning. It is also the legitimating of a language of accountability as the governing principle in public schools. Incipient in the Perot reforms was the shifting of control over public schooling away from “the public” and away from the profession-and toward business-controlled management accountability systems. These systems use children’s scores on standardized tests to measure the quality of the performance of teachers and principals, and they even use a school’s aggregate student scores as data for the comparative “ratings” of schools.
