Commentary through visual data: A critique of the United States school accountability movement

In this article drawings solicited from educators were used to assess the impact of school accountability measures on the lives of teachers in the USA. In an educational environment suffused with fear about speaking against a state-mandated high-stakes test, educators felt comfortable providing visual data. I made sense of these data by examining each drawing as a whole. The meanings of the many symbols embedded in educators' drawings were enhanced through interviews with the authors of the images. In this article I share six educators' visual representations of their perceptions of the test with accompanying analysis.