School responses to performance expectations in a high-stakes accountability setting: a mixed-methods approach

• In Event: Governing education through performance data and accountability instruments: Enactment dynamics and regulatory effects

Proposal

Existing research tends to attribute the varying responses to accountability pressures to variables of a different nature, ranging from school leadership styles to the broader socioeconomic contexts in which schools operate. However, so far, research has overlooked the role of subjective variables (such as school actors perceived and experienced pressures) in the mediation and enactment of performance-based accountability (PBA) instruments. To address this gap, this paper analyzes the production of different patterns of responses to PBA within schools. In so doing, we combine policy enactment perspective (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2011) with decoupling theory to reflect on how school actors respond to PBA instruments (Coburn 2005; Maroy and Pons 2019).

Methodologically, the research follows a sequential mixed-methods design approach (cf. Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2006), which integrates two different empirical stages. The first stage is eminently quantitative. In this stage, we constructed school categories based on variables related to both attitudes and beliefs about PBA, and perceived performance pressure. These school categories, in combination with school composition variables (socio-economic composition and performance), were then used to construct the school sample for the qualitative analysis. During the qualitative research stage, we carried out interviews with school leaders and teachers (n=50). This phase was crucial to identify all those school-level practices that actors may adopt to deal with the accountability system.

The findings of the paper show that schools do not respond to accountability regulations uniformly. Rather, PBA regulations generate a broad and varying range of school responses, which go beyond conventional classifications mainly focusing on alignment vs decoupling or high-low fidelity implementation. In this regard, we identified five school responses to PBA, namely accommodation, induced alignment, dilution, fabrication and de facto opting out. Additionally, our study also highlights the key mediating role of subjective variables in the enactment of PBA and suggests that the way policy actors translate and respond to policy mandates is not only contingent to interpretation dynamics, but also to the levels of pressure that actors experience to comply with the policies in question. In this sense, we observe that the levels of perceived pressure among school actors in terms of PBA systems not only vary significantly, but they do so partly independently of objectively defined pressure measures enforced by the educational authorities.

Authors

• Gerard Ferrer-Esteban, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

• Lluís Parcerisa, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona