Globalization of the Anglo-American approach to top-down, test-based educational accountability

[Excerpt] This chapter deals with the globalization of the Anglo-American approach to educational accountability that first emerged in the early 1980s. This top-down, test-based mode of accountability developed in the USA in incremental ways from the time of President Reagan's influential and critical report on schooling, A Nation at Risk ( 1983), which argued for school reform and the raising of standards in a policy domain over which the federal government had, historically and constitutionally, limited jurisdiction. There were also parallel developments in England from the time of Thatcher's prime ministership (1979-1990) following the 1988 Education Reform Act, which witnessed the first national curriculum in England and the introduction of standardized testing for all students in all schools. We refer here to England, rather than the U.K., given different developments in schooling in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.