ABSTRACT
For laypersons who innocently wander into the murky terrain of educational accountability and pose outwardly simple questions such as “how are our schools doing?” the professional research community’s response often sounds like it was scripted by that great American philosopher, Casey Stengel. New Yorkers in particular may remember with affection how the legendary Yankee baseball manager could lapse into endlessly labyrinthian answers to seemingly straightforward questions. Asked by Senator Estes Kefauver (Democrat, Tennessee) about antitrust law and baseball, Casey took the Senators in attendance at a 1958 hearing on an extended autobiographical tour, including side trips along the scenic byways of the philosophy of sport, syntheses of his accumulated erudition on capitalism and white collar crime, opinions about the essence of performance measurement drawn from his 48 years in baseball, and pronouncements on the comparative virtues of life in the USA, Europe, and South America-but in 45 minutes never quite answered the original question. (Mickey Mantle was up next, and when asked the same question brought the house down: “my views are about the same as Casey’s.”) (Baseball Almanac, n.d.).
