Abstract
As perhaps the harshest manifestation of the No Child Left Behind era of educational accountability, school closures have garnered much scholarly attention over recent years. They stand in as symbols for a cutthroat reform movement, and their disruptive effects are concentrated in the country’s most vulnerable and disinvested communities. However, school closures are not merely discrete events. Since closure is typically a consequence of last resort, many more schools experience it as threat than as reality. Closures are an essential part of the state’s toolkit to assert control over chronically low-performing schools. For schools placed under probationary statuses or tagged as candidates for escalating intervention, the threat of closure is an existential one, looming over them as an ambient, disciplinary force.
In her new book Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools, Erin Michaels argues that the threat of closure casts a penumbra over schools. Though severe accountability measures are supposed to incentivize better academic performance, she finds that in practice they have a corrosive effect on school culture. Students internalize stigma, and bonds of solidarity between them fray. Under enormous pressure to deliver results, the administration installs twin testing and security regimes that create oppressive conditions and soul-sucking classroom environments.
As teachers and school leaders fall into self-preservation mode, they chase metrics at the expense of engaging instruction and sometimes succumb to the temptation to juke the stats. The directives from on high to raise test scores or else are justified in the name of racial equity, yet they create all kinds of perverse incentives and unintended consequences. Michaels makes the case that punitive, top-down accountability measures often create new inequalities between the low-income, minority schools that they constrain and whiter, more affluent schools that are unencumbered by them.
The book makes a valuable contribution by shedding light on aspects of twenty-first-century school reform efforts that are not easily captured by test scores or other metrics. To do so, Michaels relies on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with students, school professionals, and community members in a predominantly Black and Hispanic inner-ring suburb of New York City. The bulk of her data were collected in the early 2010s, near the crest of that particular wave of education reform. Her account centers the voices of students, who speak in perceptive and sophisticated ways about the impact of testing and security regimes on their high school experiences and their relationships with classmates and teachers.
Michaels convincingly shows that the pressure to meet high-stakes and quantifiable targets warps the qualitative processes of schooling. Consistent with Campbell’s Law—the idea that the more consequential a metric becomes for social decision-making, the less valid of a proxy and more subject to corruption it becomes—she uncovers serious ethical violations, showing the lengths that the administration would go to post satisfactory numbers. The school identified students who were likely to drag down their scores and counseled them to drop out or threatened to report their parents to child protective services. Vivid vignettes such as these are a particular strength of the book.
This ethnographic texture is braided effectively with tight, punchy analysis. The book is short and digestible yet packed with sociological insights, written in accessible prose suitable for undergraduate courses. The substantive chapters begin by situating the field site in a familiar context of deindustrialization, white flight, and resource hoarding that leaves inner-ring suburbs in an unenviable position. Michaels argues that these cash-strapped suburbs are actually even more exposed to punitive reforms than large urban districts because they have less capacity to resist. However, without making direct comparisons to big city schools or bringing much evidence to bear on this point, this is presented more as a hypothesis than as an empirical reality.
The next major pillar of Michaels’s argument holds that the contemporary school reform movement is less about privatization than about expanding the state’s coercive authority over schools. Given that schools are governed at the district level, the threat of closure or takeover is one of the most significant policy levers that states can pull to usurp local control (and states are themselves squeezed, with federal funds contingent on them reconstituting low-performing schools). Michaels’s research shows how these politics corner school leaders into a test-prep-over-everything approach. Students sense that their education has been deprioritized, that they have been reduced to pawns in a larger power struggle between their administration and the state. So long as state oversight consists of more sticks than carrots, this is a predictable result.
The back half of the book explores what it means to attend a so-called failing school. This state-imposed stigma, Michaels finds, leads students to subscribe to negative stereotypes about their classmates and distance themselves from peers in pursuit of respectability. Students use gendered and racialized frames (constructs like rule-followers and troublemakers) to evaluate their own and others’ moral worth. In doing so, they legitimize their school’s security and testing regimes, upholding compliance as a virtue and an end unto itself.
One weakness of the book is a lack of clarity pinpointing exactly what causes schools to turn to test prep and tighter social control as strategies to stave off the state. Is it a formal or credible threat of school closure, as the title of the book implies? Or is it a broader political atmosphere where punitive logics of accountability are ascendant? Could a domineering approach and strict adherence to tested standards simply be the administration’s idea of how best to educate poor and working-class children? On this point, staff perspectives are conspicuously absent, making it difficult to establish a definitive link between policy pressures from above and school practices on the ground.
Nonetheless, Michaels’s book is a welcome addition to any education researcher, policymaker, or practitioner’s shelf. It advances our understanding of schooling under twenty-first-century accountability, helpfully widening our analytic aperture to consider the oft-overlooked cultural and nonacademic costs of pursuing metrics at all costs. It compels us to rethink the incentive structures that govern education systems. The existing policy toolkits for improving student outcomes have grown stale and unpopular, and moving forward, sociologists must think expansively about how to support students and safeguard their rights to an enriching, holistic education.