The vicious circle of malignant accountability starts with inbuilt failures of democratic deliberations (mostly mediate by the media); failures that leads to the erosion of political trust. Political distrust gives birth to an urge for continuous comparable monitoring; which in turns leads to numerical assessments that corrupt what they are about to measure thus intensifying distrust.

Malignant accountability contributes to the disempowerment of the state, leaving the civil society and the market to “freely” shape social life. It thus fosters conditions of conservatism and hinders the ability to bring about a meaningful social change.

Accountability turns malignant when it changes from a way to measure and improve a (educational) practice to a means of dictating the essence of the practice, thus turning from a means to an end, and in the process corrupting the practice it is meant to control and improve.

This is most evident in the field of education where the demand that schools would be held accountable for the value they produce for students, fosters a culture of testing that narrows the purpose of schools, demeans and trivializes the work of educators, spreads fear and motivates corruption. Moreover it grants sufficiency—the idea that equal opportunity demands allowing children to achieve (no more than) a certain minimum standard – a central role. Consequently education systems aim at the lowest denominator, losing sight of more ambitious social goals, thus preserving the present social order.