ABSTRACT
This chapter will discuss the nuances of the relationship between accountability education policies and school pushout. I will trace the particulars of what has emerged as accountability, and what was lost or obfuscated along the way. The question I pose in the middle of the chapter, “To whom are accountability policies accountable?”, serves as a reverberant chorus of the discussion. I locate accountability rhetoric, as others have, within the contexts of neoliberalism, but also attend to accountability (and neoliberalism) as an incomplete logic that does not account for many exceptions. Though it is so naturalized, likely because it is so naturalized, many readers will be unfamiliar with the concept of neoliberalism; it is the oxygen of what counts as common sense, invisible, inevitable, and easy to keep ingesting. It is for this reason that I begin with a foundational discussion of American neoliberalism.
