The Penetration of Technocratic Logic into the Educational Field: Rationalizing Schooling from the Progressives to the Present

Abstract

Educational accountability is not a recent invention. Over the course of the 20th century, there were three major movements demanding accountability in American education: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era, the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control. This impulse to rationalize schools cannot be explained by interest group or partisan explanations, as those that have purveyed the reforms defy easy ideological generalization. Instead, these reforms can be understood as a process of penetration of a “technocratic logic” into the educational sphere. In each case, this process exhibited a similar pattern: 1) the creation of a crisis of quality which destabilized the existing educational status quo; 2) the elevation of a technocratic logic, backed by the knowledge base of a high status epistemic community; 3) the rallying of ideologically diverse powerful actors external to the schools behind a commensurating logic that promised control and improvement over an unwieldy school system; and 4) the inability of the education field to resist (and often to be co-opted by) this technocratic logic, due to its historical institutionalization as a highly feminized, weak, bureaucratically-administered field lacking its own set of widely respected countervailing professional standards. Implications suggest that unless teachers are able to develop and organize themselves as a stronger field, they will remain at the whim of external actors; professionalization may also produce better outcomes than the repeated emphasis on rationalizing reforms.