ABSTRACT
The current volume explores the way in which capacity, accountability and trust shape the dynamics of educational policy and practice across national contexts. This frame provides a provocative conceptual tool for identifying and reasoning about the complexities of reforming education systems to meet social, political and academic demands that have evolved considerably over the last several decades. Indeed, unlike many frameworks, it presses the researcher to adopt a long-term perspective and, in doing so, to notice how the hand of history propels changes to society and culture and how these lead to new political dynamics that themselves influence educational policy and practice.
In this vein, the present chapter on the United States considers how historical shifts in the social and political environment have placed an extraordinary set of demand on the system and, in doing so, steadily shifted the dynamics between capacity, accountability and trust in ways that could scarcely have been imagined just a few decades ago. Our discussion opens with a brief overview of long-term trends in the United States in which we describe how increasing concerns about excellence and equity have altered the political dynamics around capacity, accountability and trust, and their significance for the education system. Section two continues with a focus on the evolution of high stakes accountability, showing how new policies interacted with the system's highly variable and often weak professional capacities to produce disparate results. In the third section, we introduce the notion of a ‘public profession’ that combines strong technical capabilities with a commitment to pluralism within a multi-racial democracy. The chapter concludes by acknowledging the enormous challenge presented by the combination of a politically polarized society, a fractured education system and the ever-growing technical demands on the teaching profession, yet makes the case that some of the positive developments over the last several decades provide reasons for optimism.
