This paper explores how evidence and accountability frame curriculum and instruction discourse in US education. Initially influenced by Jefferson, Mann, Beecher, DuBois, and Dewey (Price, 2009), US education shares “common roots” with Continental Philosophy and Humboldt and Mill (Price & Mattig, 2024). However, current education policy draws only on narrow, instrumental curriculum strands that sustain an audit culture (Apple, 2007; Taubman, 2009). Widespread bipartisan support for the Bush administration’s signature education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act (2002), placed school districts under monitoring and surveillance (Price, 2009). Educators and their students struggled to pass standardized tests and make adequate yearly progress. Administrators found the reportage cumbersome and the consequences, which included withholding school funds, unwarranted. Congress attempted NCLB reauthorization to fix some problems but stalled over disputes (Aspen, 2007; Price, 2007). In 2008, failure to reform the unpopular education law correlated with a growing lack of financial resources, rural neglect, and urban decay. The Obama administration’s American Recovery and Restoration Act (2009) stimulated the economy and sought to improve education. However, its Race to the Top (2009) initiative shifted the education paradigm from need-based to accountability-based funding. Teachers and student learning was changed. Evidence-based theory(s) (Sanders, 1984; Bambrick-Santoyo, 2010) changed teacher education noticeably. As a pre-teacher instructor, I experienced how data-driven decision-making (Price, 2014; Price, 2014; Price, 2016) reduced professional decision-making to technical and rational practices. In one example, a teacher performance assessment (edTPA) required teacher candidates to videotape their classroom lessons and submit their “evidence” for external review. Data-gathering tools such as these are structured to rely on corporations to determine “what counts” as evidence regarding teaching, learning, and curriculum. This practice stirred much debate (Adkins, 2015; Dover et al., 2015). Furthermore, even advocates for the professionalization of teaching shared doubt about the “value-added measures” employed in classrooms: . . . value-added measures of individual teachers’ presumed “effectiveness” are highly unstable, have extremely wide error ranges, and exhibit bias against teachers with classrooms with very high-achieving or low-achieving students (Darling-Hammond, 2016). As a scholar-practitioner and school board member, I experience personally and professionally “what counts” as “evidence” in contemporary US education milieus. Inspired by currere (Pinar & Grumet, 1974), I place “evidence” and “accountability” into context in this paper and, using hermeneutic study, draw a picture of how US education has left behind powerful ideas of American philosophers and European Continental Philosophy counterparts.

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