Putting the Accountability Side Effects to the Test: A Cross-National and Multilevel Analysis of Schools' Responses to External Pressures

• In Event: Enacting Accountability in Education: Consequences for Teaching Professionalism and Practice

Abstract

Objectives and purposes

Schools operate in increasingly competitive environments. Together with market pressures, performance-based accountability (PBA) has emerged as a hegemonic instrument of school control, monitoring and improvement (Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammod, 2008). Educational literature also documents how PBA pressure has generated side effects, including the intensification of test preparation, curriculum narrowing and the adoption of non-inclusive practices. Previous research has highlighted that accountability systems can trigger multiple reactions, including side effects. Our research unravels, from both cross-national and comparative perspectives, the social mechanisms favouring these reactions.



Theoretical perspectives

PBA instruments are a power and governance technology with a great capacity for conditioning, constraining and changing school actors’ behaviour. These instruments have cognitive and normative influences by framing the representations of policy stakes, the problematisation of the policy or the games of school actors (Grek et al., 2021). However, school actors interpret, translate and respond to governance instruments creatively, generating inconsistencies between the regulatory framework and the context of practice. Our study embraces a critical constructivist epistemology premised on the theoretical assumption that the way school actors respond to policy prerogatives hinges on how these actors make sense of external pressures and policy expectations and how such semiotic practices rely on broader social and institutional environments (Jabbar & Creed, 2020).


Methods and data sources

The research follows a sequential mixed-methods design approach (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2006), which integrates two empirical stages. The first relies on an international database that includes data obtained from teachers (n=3403) and school leaders (n=625) of randomly sampled urban schools in Norway, Chile and Catalonia (Spain) that have different PBA regimes and different levels of market pressure. The second stage involves semi-structured interviews with teachers (n=76) and school leaders (n=73).

The so-called side effects have mainly been analysed in countries with high-stakes accountability systems, but less is known about their presence in regimes with low-stakes and/or thin accountability. To address this gap, we apply a comparative strategy that includes educational systems with accountability regimes that vary in density (thicker and thinner) and direction (vertical and horizontal) (Högberg & Lindgren, 2021).


Results

The article argues that the emergence of side effects is unevenly distributed within educational systems. Rather, school responses to external pressures vary according to a range of contextual and subjective factors. Specifically, the position that schools occupy in their local education markets is crucial to how schools negotiate and process external pressures and with what organisational and educational outcomes.

Scientific/scholarly significance of the study

While most quantitative research on accountability focuses on the effects of performance pressure on academic outcomes (Gillborn et al., 2018), our study shows how performance pressure translates into educational and organisational practices with the potential to harm educational quality and equity and segment educational systems. Our work shows that all types of PBA regimes (including those considered low stakes) encourage segmentation practices, but this dynamic intensifies in educational settings where market forces are stronger.

Authors

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
  Presenting Author

• Antonina Levatino, Universitat de Barcelona
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gerard Ferrer-Esteban, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
  Presenting Author

• Lluis Parcerisa, Autonomous University of Barcelona
  Non-Presenting Author