The choreography of accountability

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Abstract
The prevailing performance discourse in education claims school improvements can be achieved through transparent accountability procedures. The article identifies how teachers generate performances of their work in order to satisfy accountability demands. By identifying sources of teachers’ knowledge that produce choreographed performances, I explain how teachers manage perceptions in order to garner favorable evaluations. As forms of impression management, teachers’ fabrications were political because they attempt to (re)control, or (re)claim, the discourse of what a ‘good’ teacher does/is. However, because teachers’ fabrications occur as individual and uncoordinated responses to surveillance, the analysis maps how the political organization of schools maintains teachers in subjugated roles even though teachers believe their fabrications held greater micropolitical capital than what actually occurs.

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