Tracing the Constitutive Potential of Educational Accountability Policy

Scholars show that metrics-driven accountability systems may bring socially consequential categories, identities, roles, and relationships into being. However, existing research does not always distinguish these constitutive effects from related processes of interpretation, framing, and sensemaking. Moreover, current work is often silent on whether constitutive effects are inevitable. We propose a three-stage framework for locating and comparing potential constitutive processes across the accountability cycle, using state-level variation under the Every Student Succeeds Act as a platform for examining the conditions under which constitutive effects arise. Our framework emphasizes the value of identifying constitutive effects and tracing how they may relate to other reactive responses to accountability policy.