Accountability Policy Ecologies in Hong Kong: Constructing Identities, Values, and Interactions

• In Event: Enacting Accountabilities in Education (Part 2): Its Effects on Teachers' Work and on the Teaching Profession

Abstract

Objectives
This study examined the relationships between accountability policy ecologies and the character and work of educators in primary and secondary schools in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (herein referred to as Hong Kong). Two main questions were pursued in this study: 1) In what ways do performativity, managerialism, and datafication operate in accountability policy ecology in Hong Kong?; and 2) In what ways does accountability policy ecology shape the identities of, values of, and interactions between teachers and school leaders?

Perspectives
The enactment and ongoing renovation of test-based, managerial, and performance accountability policy can be understood through Weaver-Hightower’s (2008) metaphor of policy ecology. Policy ecologies refer to the multilayered, shifting, and amorphous ecosystems that frame policy processes. The texts, actors, relationships, processes, and environments that constitute policy ecosystems are fluid and marked by struggles for power and validation. Theory on managerialism, performativity (Ball, 2008, 2010), and data use (Authors, 2019) provide anchors through which to draw analytic connections between accountability policy ecologies shape the interactions, values, and identities of teachers and leaders.

Methods and Data Sources
Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) was employed as an epistemological stance and a method (Young & Diem, 2017) through which to examine Hong Kong’s accountability policy ecology and effects. CPA sees policymaking as political, value laden, ridden with myriad intended and unintended consequences, and engrained in complex systems with complicated webs of actors (Prunty, 1985). This CPA was constructed through documents data. From school websites and the Education Bureau website, I gathered documents that focused on Hong Kong’s portfolio of accountability policies, as well as School Development Plans and evaluation reports from 25 demographically diverse primary and secondary schools. Using content and discourse analyses (Bacchi, 2000; Foucault, 2002), I problematized how performativity and datafication frame values, identities, and interactions between teachers and leaders.

Findings
The analysis finds that the ecology of accountability in Hong Kong is underpinned by disciplines of efficiency, competition, survival, productivity, and comparisons. Centralized decentralization and competition constitute the means and ends through which school leaders and teachers make sense of performativity and datafication. The school development plans articulated goals associated with authentic, professionalism-focused school improvement, as well as performance accountability. I conclude from these findings that teachers and school leaders “code switch” between sets of values, identities and interactions that are associated with authentic, praxis-based school improvement and those that are associated with structural, performative school reform.

Significance
This study interrogates the consequences of accountability on social arrangements and identities and the ways in which these consequences are at odds with professional culture and school improvement. It moves forward the small but growing body of research (Hui, Brown & Chan, 2017; Lee, Kwan & Li, 2019; Tse, 2019) that adopts a critical, sociocultural lens on accountability in Hong Kong, an understudied, high performing East Asian education system.

Author

• Priya Goel La Londe, The University of Hong Kong