Education Accountability and Repression of Democracy Post-9/11 Pauline Lipman DePaul University, Chicago, USA Abstract This paper examines the role of education accountability policies as ideological support for political repression and war in the post-9/11 U.S. political context. It focuses on the relationship of accountability policies to the growing suppression of civil liberties and racial targeting and justifications for military aggression. Drawing on qualitative data from a study of Chicago public schools, I examine how accountability discourses and practices are actually experienced in schools as a system of coercion. I argue that the policies normalize surveillance, regulation and punishment; promote rigid binaries of good/bad students, teachers, and schools; erode social solidarities; and undermine critical thought and agency. In this way, education policies and practices contribute to a shift in U.S. political culture that legitimates the suppression of critical thought and action, obedience to authority, punishment of dissent, racial profiling and regulation of people of color, and restriction of democratic participation. The paper situates the state’s political response to 9/11 and its policy of pre-emptive war in relation to the crisis of legitimacy of capitalist globalization and challenges to neoliberalism from below. This post-hegemonic context clarifies what is at stake, politically and educationally. It defines both the urgency and the opportunity for defining a liberatory politics of education..