Community, Collaboration, and Accountability: Practitioner Strategies Amidst Hybrid Governance Reforms

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Re-Scaling School Governance: New Spatial Perspectives on Autonomy, Assessment, and Accountability in Post-neoliberal Education

Proposal

The current educational landscape is marked by the waning influence of classical neoliberalism and a turn toward post-neoliberal frameworks that emphasize hybrid governance, equity, and collective responsibility. Within this policy context, marked by skepticism toward market logics and renewed attention to collaboration, this paper examines how a personalized learning charter school in the United States navigates the contradictions of heightened accountability and the growing policy emphasis on community engagement.

The study draws on data collected from two secondary-level charter schools located in Los Angeles, California, USA both of which serve diverse student populations and operate under hybrid accountability frameworks. We employ a comparative case study design using ethnographic methods, including archival and document analysis, classroom-level observations, and narrative interviews with teachers, administrators, and support staff. For analysis, we use iterative coding strategies informed by the paper’s theoretical framing of hybrid governance, attending to how practitioners make sense of and reframe accountability mandates through practices of trust, dialogue, and collective responsibility.

Drawing on these methods, we explore how teachers and staff respond creatively to overlapping demands for demonstrable results and for authentic collaboration. We find that neither market-based nor purely democratic, school-level frames alone can explain how accountability reforms are experienced at the ground level. Instead, practitioners strategically leverage trust, dialogue, and collective action to reorganize how external mandates are enacted within their school community.

These complex strategies echo the symposium's broader themes, highlighting the limits of school-level autonomy and the importance of re-scaling governance toward interconnected networks and partnerships. Our findings suggest that as post-neoliberal paradigms re-shape educational reform, fostering robust, relational practices of collaboration will be crucial for advancing both equity and systemic resilience in an era of shifting policy expectations.

This complex navigation resonates with the symposium’s central themes: the limits of individual school autonomy, the need for new forms of multi-actor cooperation, and the emergence of hybrid accountability modes that move beyond conventional dichotomies.

Author

• Patricia Burch, University of Southern California