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Utilizing "assemblage," a notion associated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), we explore what discourses of transparency can, and cannot, accomplish in a network of education reform that includes schools, government agencies, and community organizations. Drawing on data collected between July 2011 and March 2013 in an ethnographically-informed case study, we interrogate the ways in which notions of transparency illuminate, and also conceal, information, as well as reveal how they reorder power dynamics and relationships, impacting what it legitimized as reform in a city in Western New York. We problematize the linkages between the political conditions in which mandatory transparency and accountability in schooling become connected to voluntary transparency in local education reform, and we examine the investment made by schools and reform organizations in using transparency as a proxy for meeting accountability demands and establishing education expertise. The findings show that discourses and enactments of transparency can be effective in drawing targeted and repeated attention to select things, such as funding inequities. However, such discourses can also be utilized to obscure other issues, such as persistent disparities in academic achievement by race. When used synonymously with accountability, transparency can, and is, incorrectly positioned as an education solution.

In the United States (US), an increase in standardization, quantification, competition, and large-scale comparison--cornerstones of neoliberal accountability--have been accompanied by devices of transparency, through which various forms of school data are made available to the public. Such public reporting, we are told by politicians and education officials, is essential for improving schools and reforming education. Using a framework of political spectacle, we reveal, however, that such transparency does more to legitimize the political action of those who promote transparency in education than it does to reform schooling. In fact, drawing on ethnographic data collected in New York City (NYC) between 2005 and 2011, we interrogate the ways in which politicians, state education officers, city officials, school district, educational leaders, and the media use the transparency of numbers and quantified accounts of academic achievement to draw attention away from the ways in which NCLB negatively impacts poor, Black, and Latino youth. We demonstrate that transparency selectively magnifies the ways in which NYC is making schools more accountable, and strategically hides the persistent racial and class achievement gaps. Finally, we discuss how, in the rush to provide evidence to the federal government, to states, and to the public, exuding confidence through transparency has emerged victorious over generating accurate data in order to attend to the disparities in American public schools.