Comparing decision-making of school inspectors in Argentina, the Netherlands and Germany

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Leadership and decision making in improving school quality

Proposal

School inspection is a central instrument for monitoring and improving school quality in more than 60 countries around the world. However, across these many countries, there is a great deal of variation. The processes followed, information gathered, and the consequences attached to inspection reports all vary greatly. For example, in some cases, findings by inspectors are high stakes; the findings and recommendations are binding, made available for the public, and may result in job losses or other sanctions to be incurred by the school community. In other cases, inspectors act more as advisors to school leaders with limited means to enforce change. We hypothesize that this key difference, the degree of accountability attached to the inspection process, likely influences how inspectors think and may shape their recommendations and/or final report. A better understanding of how this pressure shapes the ways inspectors enact their role can help school systems looking to implement or revise their inspection system.

Comparing several countries, our study focuses on two questions: 1) How do inspectors proceed when evaluating the quality of schools? 2) How do they justify their decision on school quality? To focus specifically on accountability pressure, we analyze three contrasting cases - Argentina, the Netherlands and Germany. Argentina has a very low-stakes system. The Netherlands has strong accountability where inspectors follow a series of standards for legal aspects, quality processes and outcomes, and the inspection results are publicly available. Finally, a moderate-stakes system exists in Germany. After the inspection takes place, schools are tasked to negotiate target agreements with school authorities.
The study draws on the sensemaking approach (Weick 1995; Spillane et al. 2002) to understand the decision-making of school inspectors and to learn more about the information used during the inspection. Furthermore, the paper draws on justification theory (Boltanski & Thévenot 2007) to analyze how school inspectors explain their decisions. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews with school inspectors in the three countries were coded and analyzed using both deductive and inductive codes. Data were coded according to Miles and Huberman’s (1994) approach to qualitative analysis by looking at patterns and themes within and across individual responses.

Preliminary results show that the school inspectorates utilize different proceedings and they rely on different information when they evaluate schools: For example, in the case of Germany (moderate case), a team of inspectors apply standardized indicators to classroom observations. Whereas in Argentina, individual inspectors focus primarily on providing ongoing support to and judgements on school quality might even be co-constructed with school leaders. This research will contribute to our understanding of school inspection and the ways accountability pressure shape the process and outcomes.

Authors

• Anne Piezunka, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• Pablo Bezem, Michigan State University

• Rebecca Jacobsen, Michigan State University