Pausing for Answerability: A Critical Investigation of U.S. Assessment and Accountability Decisions Amidst the covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This paper takes up Leigh Patel’s (2016) methodological stance of pausing to consider how and whether the U.S. federal government’s theory of educational change, or their plan for educational equity and accountability, is answerable to Black, Indigenous, and students of color in the context of the global pandemic, the switch to remote learning, and global uprisings for Black lives. To discuss the federal government’s current theory of educational change, we (the authors) conducted a policy document review, outlining the U.S.’s educational response(s) to the ongoing global health crisis. The paper reports on current federal law requirements and waivers for: assessments, accountability, reporting, and school identification. We also discuss how the federal educational response is limited for addressing the context and learning of Black, Indigenous and students of color. We practice answerability by positing alternative approaches for educational policymaking in the age of covid-19.

A Critical Systematic Literature Review of Global Inclusive Education Using an Affective, Intersectional, Discursive, Emotive and Material Lens

“…Several studies theorized inclusive education through critical and post-structural, and decolonial theories such as critical theory and pedagogy [27], social reproduction theory such as Bourdieu's social, cultural and symbolic capital [26], critical race theory [28], Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) [13][14][15], decolonial theories [29] and Disability Studies in Education (DSE) [30,31] that included other theories such as resistance theory of dis/Ability [14] that accounted for global intersectional dis/Ability cultural studies and politics [15].…”

“…(1) educational needs along academic, social and emotional development for belonging and engagement [27,29,41,43], (2) dis/Ability along with race, gender, language and other social identities and contexts [14,15,31] and (3) inclusive education that only centered one singular social identity such as race [42,44], LGBTQ [43] or incarcerated youth [39].…”

“…The research designs for the literature on global inclusive education can be organized around six different types of research design approaches: (1) literature reviews [14,24], (2) mix methods [32,33], (3) qualitative genres such as case study, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, interpretative traditions, autoethnography, hermeneutic phenomenology among others [29,40,43,45], (4) quantitative genres [41], (5) policy analysis [38] and (6) theoretical analysis [15]. In addition, some of the studies [39,44] did not clearly articulate a specific research design genre, which would have been helpful.…”

“…The data collection procedures ranged from primary to secondary data [46,47] from local, national and international policy documents [29,45,48] and organizations to traditional qualitative research interviewing and focus-groups [27,33,48], observation and fieldwork entries [49][50][51][52], researcher observation to literature data [7,53] to gathering information from key people [46,54] and survey response compilation [53,55] in order to answer the researcher's research questions about global inclusive education and law.…”

“…There were a total of nine different types of qualitative and quantitative data analysis [40,41,44] procedures used on the information sources collected. These included content analysis [30], narrative analysis [42], situational analysis [31,37], policy and document analysis [29,39,53], theoretical analysis using critical theories and cultural studies [15,28], data reduction [25], thematic analysis [34,56] and qualitative research synthesis [14].…”