Equity, Standardization, and Educators’ Perspectives on the Enactment of Large-Scale Standardized Testing: A Case Study of Urban Schools in Ontario, Canada

This paper focuses on the perspectives and experiences of teachers in urban high schools in relation to performance-based accountability systems in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on policy enactment theory to capture how standardized testing policies are taken up by teachers, we seek to conceptualize teachers as front-line policy enactors who play a significant role in the policy process. We capture the complex and differentiated responses to testing policies that teachers in our study took by drawing on the typology of policy actors developed by Ball, Maguire and Braun (2012) that positions teachers as narrators, enthusiasts, critics, and receivers of policy. This typology is used as a heuristic device to structure the detailed description of policy actors’ work that emerged from our data. This paper provides significant insight into the implications of large-scale standardized testing policies for educators and equity-deserving students from the perspectives of urban educators.