ABSTRACT
Like education, curriculum and pedagogy, evaluation practices are themselves organizations of activity that produce space and time by mobilizing and accumulating distant settings into present contexts and accounts. Accountability and accounting have been key themes for educational reform in many contexts in the last decades. Indeed, we can link the concern for standardization that we discussed in Chapter 6 with that for accountability. In efforts to ensure that standards are achieved, practices are accounted for, made both calculable and representable. Massive resources have, therefore, been poured into developing agencies to hold education to account and develop practices through which to account for what goes on in educational settings. This is the focus of this chapter. Before going further into ANT inflections on these issues, any discussion of accountability in education or elsewhere must start by recognizing its various forms. For instance, there is:
• fiscal accountability • legal accountability (compliance with explicit regulations) • bureaucratic outcomes-oriented accountability (duty to the organization’s
mission) • community accountability (duty to care) • professional accountability (duty to a profession’s discipline and ethics).
