By the Assemblage: Physical Education Teachers' Encounters of a State Teacher Accountability System

With a focus on the American context, the study investigates a teacher accountability reform as an expanding assemblage of neoliberal governance by providing an account of physical education teachers who were experiencing an accountability reform that required them to document student learning growth for teacher evaluation. Through stratified sampling, 51 teachers were sampled from elementary, middle and high schools in North Carolina that served socioeconomically diverse communities for an online survey and a semi-structured in-depth interview on their experiences with the accountability system and their envisioning of the future system. Reductive analysis yielded three themes. First, to prevent their program from being expendable, teachers subjected themselves to the accountability system by identifying with assessment and evaluation knowledge and adopting self-disciplinary practices. Second, they recognized the partiality, irrationality and discontinuity of various assessment as it reduced complex physical education learning through questionable quantification processes. Third, teachers experienced profound inequality in the accountability system, as the system applied different governance technologies towards the tested and non-tested subjects. Situated in theories of power (Foucault, 1982), assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) and graduated governance (Ong, 2006), the study conceptualizes the teacher accountability system as an expanding assemblage of neoliberal governance. It attempted to include physical education under its governance but exacerbated the existing inequality across tested and non-test subjects. The results of the study suggest scholars and teachers in physical education to seek creative strategies to quantify student learning, having the values of the subject recognized in and beyond the accountability system.