The current crisis in American schools has been more than fifty years in the making. The present assumption that “accountability†equals “testing†and that “education†equals “measurable objectives†has occurred in a brief lifetime. How has this happened? Quantz attempts to answer this question in this fascinating study. It is not a history of the movement, but an exploration of how the nonrational aspects of schooling, especially ritual(s), have been harnessed to construct a commonsense which serves the interests of transnational corporations, leaving those educators committed to democracy to develop a new pedagogy that rejects the technical solutions that present reforms demand.
