Individual repository of Sherman Dorn, Professor, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. In my scholarship, I trace how society defines school problems and how those definitions shape education policy. In my first major research project, I documented that dropping out became defined as a crisis in the 1960s when the proportion of teens graduating from high school had been rising for years. I have written on various topics on special education, from the fuzzy public-private divide to how the mass culture of test-prep undermines formative assessment. My book on accountability explores how we have come to distrust schoolteachers but trust test scores.