In and Out of the "Pressure Cooker": Schools' Varying Responses to Accountability and Datafication

• In Event: Enacting Accountabilities in Education (Part 1): Its Effects on School Practices and Outcomes

Abstract

Objectives
This paper aims to analyze the production of different patterns of responses to PBA within schools from a policy enactment perspective. Specifically, we analyze how school actors’ interpretations of and dispositions toward PBA, on the one hand, and their experienced levels of pressure, on the other, influence how they respond to the accountability regulatory system.

Perspectives
Our perspective is premised on the assumption that the way school actors respond to policy prerogatives is contingent on the way these actors make sense of PBA pressures and expectations within their broader social and institutional frameworks (Diamond & Spillane, 2004). The study uses decoupling theory as a starting point to reflect on how school actors respond to performance-based accountability measures (Coburn, 2005; Maroy & Pons, 2019). We hypothesize that school responses to accountability are mediated by two core variables: first, the perceived performative pressures and, second, the school ethos (whether it is more or less oriented toward academic outcomes).

Methods and Data Sources
The research follows a sequential mixed-methods design approach (cf. Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2006), which integrates two different empirical stages. The first stage is eminently quantitative and relies on a database that includes data collected from questionnaires administered to teachers (n=1130) and school leaders (n=200), distributed among 79 schools that were selected through a stratified sample strategy. In this stage, we constructed school categories based on variables related to both attitudes and beliefs about PBA, and perceived performance pressure. These school categories, in combination with school composition variables (socio-economic composition and performance), were then used to construct the school sample for the qualitative analysis. During the qualitative research stage, we conducted interviews with teachers and school leaders (n=50). The schools for this stage were selected taking into consideration their social composition (school vulnerability index, MINEDUC, 2019) and level of performance (Agencia de Calidad de la Educación, 2018).

Findings
This paper shows that PBA regulations generate a broad and varying range of school responses, which go beyond conventional classifications mainly focusing on alignment vs decoupling or high-low fidelity implementation. We identified five school responses to PBA, namely accommodation, induced alignment, dilution, fabrication and de facto opting out. Our study also highlights the mediating role of subjective variables in the enactment of PBA, such as the perceived pressure in terms of understanding how and to what extent schools make sense of and react to external accountability prerogatives.

Significance
Existing research has overlooked the role of subjective variables (such as school actors’ perceived and experienced pressures) in the mediation and enactment of PBA. To address this gap, this paper analyzes the production of different patterns of responses to PBA within schools from a policy enactment perspective, which go beyond conventional alignment-decoupling dichotomy and include a more varying range of options. In fact, our research shows that the way policy actors translate and respond to policy mandates is not only contingent to interpretation dynamics, but also to the levels of pressure that actors experience to comply with the policies in question.

Authors

• Gerard Ferrer-Esteban, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Lluís Parcerisa, Autonomous University of Barcelona