Emergence of Test-Based Accountability in Minas Gerais (Brazil): the political economy of a new testing regime

• In Event: The Dissemination and Enactment of Global Educational Reforms in Brazil: unpacking the political economy and (undesired) impacts of test-based managerial accountability

Proposal

This presentation will explore the political economy of the dissemination of test-based accountability reforms in Minas Gerais, Brazil. As many other countries, Brazil is engaging in the so-called Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), which combines several policies, instruments, and tools, including: the new public management (NPM) paradigm; and instruments and tools related to managerial Test-Based Accountability (TBA) plus autonomy (SAWA) (Sahlberg, 2012; Verger et al., 2013). In addition, both GERM, TBA, and SAWA require and promote (in a reiterated ‘elective affinity’) datafication, algorithmization, and algocracy. Still, despite its pervasive narrative, and its broad diffusion, GERM is not always always a coherent, homogeneous, and monolithic framework, but presents different ‘paths’ and ‘trajectories’ (engaging in different rationales, contexts, actors in each specific context) (Verger et al., in press). Indeed those reforms are selectively adopted (Peck & Theodore 2010), and combined with other international, national, and sub-national educational policies.
In this presentation the following research questions will be answered: Why and how SAWA policies have been implemented in Minas Gerais? What is their theory of change? What and how different political actors have reacted to them? What is the link between those policies and the datification and algocracy of education, as well as of the privatization ‘of’ and ‘in’ education policy? And finally, what are the impacts of those policies in terms of (re)shaping meanings and practices on different actors (schools, principals, teachers, students, families)?
Our theoretical framework has been based on the evolutionary mechanisms and drivers for change of the cultural political economy approach, intensive process-tracing analysis, and the concepts of theory of change (Falletti, 2016; Jessop, 2010; Pawson & Tilley, 1997).
The main method of the research was qualitative discourse analysis of both secondary sources (academic literature, policy texts -e.g., legislation, parliamentary discourses), and primary ones (semi-structured interviews with key informants, in a non-stratified strategy, n=23).
The main results of the research include: The identification of ideational and material drivers for institutional change at different evolutionary moments (variation, selection, and retention), such as administrative-educational crisis construction, or combination of neoliberal and NPM political traditions; changes on teachers practices (both pedagogical and organizational) and identity (i.e., performativity); and the identification of different local (politicians, labor unions, academic researchers, philanthropic organizations) and global actors (international organizations) that have actively participated in the implementation -and resistance- towards those reforms.

Author

• Andreu Termes, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona