Session Submission Summary

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

Tue, April 19, 9:30 to 11:00am CDT (9:30 to 11:00am CDT), Hyatt Regency - Minneapolis, Floor: 2, Greenway E

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In recent decades, accountability has gained centrality in the global education agenda.
In the context of an increasingly interdependent and globalized knowledge economy, both exogenous and endogenous pressures have fostered a growing concern to increase the quality and equity of education systems worldwide. As a result, countries from different regions and with unequal levels of economic development have initiated reform processes to modernize their education systems with the aim of raising student achievement (Sahlberg, 2006). In the education sector, the modernization agenda includes a wide range of measures such as school autonomy, centrally-defined learning standards and accountability mechanisms linked to national large-scale assessments (Ball, Junemann & Santori, 2017), also known as performance-based accountability (PBA) (Hamilton et al. 2002).

PBA is spreading intensively across the globe and has become the hegemonic form of accountability in education (Lingard, et al. 2013; Maroy, 2015; Verger et al. 2019). PBA focuses on student performance evaluated through standardized tests, and usually involves consequences for the account-givers, namely schools, teachers and/or principals. This form of accountability aims to increase students learning achievement and improve schools’ responsiveness towards educational authorities, parents, and school communities. In this regard, the main assumption behind PBA is that holding principals and teachers accountable for student performance, and attaching consequences to test results, will extrinsically-motivate them to improve the quality of instruction and adopt effective organizational and educational strategies (Hatch, 2013; Mintrop, 2004). Additionally, PBA is also intended to provide new metrics and sources of data and encourage data use among school actors to favor instructional improvement. A number of studies have shown that PBA can favor changes in instruction, targeted development strategies (Elstad, 2009; Firestone & Donaldson, 2019), and increase student achievement (Chiang, 2009; Hanushek & Raymond, 2005), while an emergent group of studies have pointed out that external pressures attached to PBA instruments can have non-intended or even undesired effects on schools, teachers and instructional strategies. These undesired effects include cheating, curriculum narrowing, cream-skimming, tracking, etc. (Amrein & Berliner, 2003; Au, 2007; Berryhill et al. 2009; Falabella, 2014; Nichols & Berliner, 2007).

Counterintuitively, a growing number of countries is adopting PBA, while evidence on the mechanisms and circumstances under which these policy instruments generate certain effects remain still inconclusive. Governance instruments such as PBA have an “existence independent of the decisions that created them” (Kassim & Le Galès, 2010, p. 11). In this regard, the papers included in this symposium offer a global overview of diverse educational settings and accountability regimes and address the ways in which PBA instruments with different policy designs are enacted and its effects in school markets and schools’ logics of action.

The main purpose of the symposium is to examine how PBA instruments are enacted and recontextualized in different contexts, and their regulatory effects on school governance and teaching practices. Special attention is paid to regulatory effects of PBA instruments on schools and school actors’ behaviors and their practices to cope with performance pressures.

The cases covered (England, Chile, Norway, The Netherlands, and Spain) include countries with different administrative traditions (Social-Democratic, Napoleonic and Public Interest) and policy designs (high and low-stakes). The analysis of these cases allows for a better understanding of the mechanism and circumstances that explain variegated school responses to PBA pressures. In this regard, the session will shed light on the role of local education markets, sense-making processes (Coburn, 2006; Spillane, et al. 2002; Candido, 2020) and material contingencies in the enactment of data-intensive instruments (Ball et al. 2011). The session will also provide a better understanding of how PBA instruments with different designs might generate certain regulatory effects when enacted at district and school levels in diverse institutional and school settings.

This symposium will have four 15 minutes presentations, 15 minutes for discussant comments, and 15 minutes of debate between panelists and session attendees.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant