It seems unlikely to us that schools operating in the default mode—where all questions of accountability related to student learning are essentially questions of individual teacher responsibility—will be capable of responding to strong obtrusive accountability systems in ways that lead to systematic deliberate improvement of instruction and student learning. The idea that a school will improve, and therefore, the overall performance of its students, implies a capacity for collective deliberation and action that schools in our sample did not exhibit. Where virtually all decisions about
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