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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

As results of globalization processes, many countries around the world are facing an imperative for public sector reform in their administrative systems -including education. Particularly, education is considered a key sector to promote human capital and national competitiveness, and to engage into the knowledge economy. Consequently, educational reforms have emerged as a central element of the global political agenda, which is articulated on the basis of a Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This movement combines standards-based management, performance evaluation, and accountability.
Still, despite being a global phenomenon, the GERM has been more deeply analyzed in Anglo-Saxon countries, while the so-called “Global South” has received only limited academic attention. Indeed, this panel aims to address this gap, by focusing on the dissemination, enactment, and impact of the GERM (in the specific form of test-based managerial accountability) in Brazilian education.
The selection of Brazil as case-study obeys different rationales: its strategical position (one of the biggest emerging national economies, the so-called BRICS) with a current volatile political situation; its persistent socio-educational inequalities, based on territorial, ethnic, and socio-economic factors; its administrative federal administration (thus, engaging in national-subnational tensions), with a highly decentralized school system (combining various accountability regimes, combining both low and high-stakes); and its long engagement in a New Public Management-inspired reform -the ‘managed revolution’ in education.
In this sense, this Brazilian case-study will show how specific tools and instruments of the GERM are selectively adopted, how they are combined with other international, national, and sub-national instruments and tools (e.g. evaluation schemes, large scale assessments, data infrastructures), and what are some of their potential impacts -including some undesired effects.
In order to do so, this panel will offer two complimentary approaches. On the one hand, a political economy approach, that will address the processes of dissemination of those GERM reforms: how they are framed in specific and contextual new modes of governance and heterarchies (including philanthropic organizations, such as Todos Pela Educação, Unibanco Institute or F. Lemman); how they are anchored in several political ideologies (neoliberalism, neoconservatism) and educational paradigms (test-based accountability assumptions and theory of change); and what are the different actors (catch-it all parties, political entrepreneurs, labor unions, or well-connected philanthropic organizations) that support or resist to them. This cultural political analysis will focus particularly in the cases of Minas Gerais, and Santa Catarina, and Florianópolis. On the other hand, it will be analyzed the impacts of the implementation of test-based accountability in terms of gaming the system; to do so we perform estimation models to establish to what extent the incentive schemes of the test-based accountability system (pedagogic and financial incentives’ schemes, high vs. low-stakes tests), are associated with the probability of adopting opportunistic strategies to increase illicitly the test results. This is an innovative approach that allows us to substantiate the phenomenon with empirical evidence generated from the database of the standardized tests.
This panel will show how the dissemination of GERM (and, specifically, of evaluation schemes and test-based managerial accountability) is context-sensitive, and follows variegated policy trajectories. In that process, GERM policies are anchored on different (sometimes contradictory) theoretical, educational, and political assumptions and traditions; and -because of that-, they engagewith several actors (in strange-bedfellows alliances). Still, those reforms tend to have an ‘elective affinity’ both with datification and algocracy of education, as well as of the privatization ‘of’ and ‘in’ education policy. And, last but not least, that -although still underanalyzed-, they may have several undesired effects, such as the fueling of ‘gaming’ the evaluation systems, and cheating practices.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Globalization and Education

Chair

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Individual Presentations

• How New Philanthropy is Co-producing Education Policy: heterarchical relationships in Brazil - Marina Avelar, Institute of Education, University College London

• Public–Private Interface in Brazilian Education Governance: reflections from a subnational analysis - Helena Hinke Dobrochinski Candido, University of Helsinki

• Emergence of Test-Based Accountability in Minas Gerais (Brazil): the political economy of a new testing regime - Andreu Termes, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Rationale for School Gaming in Test-Based accountability systems: an analysis of perverse incentives in Brazil - Andreu Termes, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Gerard Ferrer-Esteban, Autonomous University of Barcelona; Antonina Levatino, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Discussant

• Tristan McCowan, University College London