The Enactment of Performance-Based Accountability in Madrid: Unpacking Rationalities and School Responses

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

Abstract

Objectives
The main objective of this research is to better understand how school actors make sense of administrative and market forms of accountability and to identify the strategies and practices through which school actors address different external accountability pressures.

Perspectives
The paper adopts a policy enactment perspective (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2012) to analyze the interpretation and translation of accountability policy prerogatives under market and administrative logics. This research addresses the cognitive dimension of policy enactment as suggested by sense-making theory (Spillane, 2004; Coburn, 2005), which stresses that principals and teachers are active policy enactors. From this point of view, the paper provides an analysis on how new accountability policy mandates are accommodated or not to previous ideas, values, and school practices. By doing so, the paper aims to better understand the policy enactment of accountability tools and identify potential dynamics of decoupling and re-coupling between the demands of the policy environment and actual school practices (Meyer & Rowan, 1977).

Methods and Data Sources
Methodologically, this paper conducts qualitative empirical research on the basis of the case study approach. More specifically, this research develops an explanatory single case study with embedded units of analysis (Yin, 2003). The main data sources of this study come from semi-structured interviews (n=41) with school actors. The case study gathers data from eight schools with different social and organizational characteristics. The schools have been selected following theoretical sampling criteria according to different factors including (i) the type of school provider (public or private), (ii) the socio-economic status of the school, and (iii) the school culture. Textual qualitative data is analyzed with inductive emerging codes and predefined deductive codes.

Findings
The case study of Madrid indicates that administrative and market forms of accountability operate together to increase external pressures, which are experienced unevenly in different schools and generate multiple school practices and responses. The results confirm that schools adopt different strategies and practices in response to PBA, according to a complex interaction between different factors, namely, the schools' pedagogical approach, their performance culture, the student population and the subjective perception of external pressures. The evidence provided indicates that the combination of market and administrative forms of accountability can generate increasing performative pressures that schools tend to address with superficial responses and de-coupled school practices.

Significance
This research contributes to understanding how and why dynamics of policy decoupling and recoupling take place in schools stressing the importance of cognitive and subjective factors. To this regard, this research reinforces the idea that the enactment of accountability policy instruments is not only determined by the formal scheme of sanctions and incentives attached to the accountability regime (high or low stakes), but is highly mediated by the subjective perceptions of the external pressures of the policy environment. Moreover, the pressures of the policy environment can arise from the current and formal policy designs but can also be the result of early policy precedents, which modulate policy perceptions of fairness and adequacy.

Author

• Marcel Pagès, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona