ABSTRACT
Subgroup accountability, the requirement that student subgroups delineated by gender, race, disability, and language status make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in addition to the student body overall, has been the central lever of federal education policy to promote equity while raising academic standards since the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The evidence is mixed as to whether a citation under subgroup accountability fulfills its intention to focus schools on the student subgroups identified as failing to make AYP. Studies that explore the mechanisms of implementation behind subgroup accountability’s variable success in improving the performance of identified subgroups are lacking. This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of a public middle school to demonstrate how school-level data practices mediate a school’s response to a citation under subgroup accountability policy. Subgroup accountability’s regulatory power can be amplified, reduced, or vary by subgroup, depending on the ways that teachers and school administrators make sense of student performance data. Technical discussions about data disaggregation and the most appropriate units of comparison, as well as debates about how to interpret data based on the subgroup at issue served as sites where staff co-constructed understandings about the gravity of achievement gaps. By invoking the intensive needs of the student body and subgroup-specific perceptions during these interactions, teachers and administrators decreased the urgency around achievement gaps and, thereby, created conditions that lessened the pressure exerted by subgroup accountability. Although subgroup accountability is designed to exert uniform pressure across schools and subgroups, findings in this chapter indicate that the effects of subgroup accountability vary based on school demographics and on teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of students.
