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Session Submission Summary

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

Mon, March 30, 9:45 to 11:00am, Hilton, Floor: Lobby Level - Tower 3, Golden Gate 4

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

Educational institutions worldwide are facing increasingly complex challenges. Issues such as rising child poverty, migratory flows, urban gentrification, and digitalization, particularly after COVID, have a direct impact on the daily life of schools. These factors are closely intertwined with the persistence of inequalities in educational opportunities, as well as to school dropout and other forms of social and educational vulnerability (Condron et al., 2024; Gajderowicz et al., 2025; Green et al., 2023; Kim & Cooc, 2022).
Over the past twenty years, policies focused on school autonomy have helped move toward a more context-sensitive education and have strengthened decision-making capacity within schools. However, the evidence accumulated in recent years shows that these initiatives are insufficient to address the above-mentioned challenges. These limitations have sparked a sense of institutional isolation and lack of support, as well as increased inequality, competition and fragmentation in the educational local spaces (Hossain, 2023; Quilabert et al., 2025; Torres, 2021).
At the same time, schools have increasingly been subjected to tighter external control through external assessments and related accountability mechanisms. This move places the focus on individual schools as the central units held responsible for student outcomes, typically measured by standardized tests. In many cases, particularly when external assessments are tied to performance-based accountability systems, evidence shows intensified side effects, including curriculum narrowing, excessive teaching to the test, declining teacher satisfaction and sense of professionalism, and heightened student discrimination (Levatino et al., 2024; Jerrim & Sims, 2022).
Overall, these widely spread school governance approaches have proven inadequate for addressing the complex challenges schools face today. A consensus is emerging around the idea that schools alone cannot respond to such challenges, as these are problems with a strong structural and territorial dimension that require sustained cooperation and coordination mechanisms among multiple social and educational actors. Several national and local governments are rethinking governance frameworks to incentivize collaboration between educational institutions and alternative accountability approaches that prioritize more than just narrow, school-level outcomes (Carrasco-Aguilar et al., 2024; Abrantes, 2011; Armstrong et al., 2021). These new governance frameworks range from fostering community, multifactor partnerships to address social challenges by promoting ‘connective professionalism’ (see, e.g., Noordegraaf, 2020; Adams et al., 2020) among teachers to reshape the future of education. Such approaches often leverage broader territorial resources and the spatial dimension of schooling to support collaborative teaching and learning processes across schools.
An implicit assumption of this emerging policy approach is that meaningful autonomy and accountability in education that minimizes negative side effects requires not only a shift in focus but also a recalibration of the locus and scale of devolution and accountability practices. This entails moving from isolated, autonomous schools that are solely held accountable for student’s learning outcomes, to interconnected school networks and partnerships with other community organizations which form a collective entity accountable for broader educational and social outcomes.
Such a policy shift is intended to prioritize shared responsibility among schools, foster meaningful collaboration, sustain improvement dynamics, and mobilize additional educational resources at the local level. However, the success of this approach depends on careful policy design and implementation that effectively organizes collaboration and accountability relationships and practices within the framework of educational networks.
The purpose of the panel is to bring together recent theoretical developments and empirical studies on policies across different contexts that join this policy approach. The studies that compose this symposium examine regulatory frameworks, implementation processes, and impacts of such initiatives in diverse educational settings.
The panel explores how emerging forms of educational governance are reconfiguring the relationships between schools, communities, and the state. Collectively, the four papers examine the limits of school-level autonomy and accountability, and highlight how networked, zone-based, and hybrid governance arrangements are reshaping the landscape of educational policy and practice.
The first paper maps diverse international cases that illustrate both the potential and tensions of creating intermediate, zone-based governance structures for collaboration and shared responsibility between schools. The second paper deepens this inquiry by reviewing how interorganizational networks are held to account. Its findings reveal the persistence of hierarchical, school-centered accountability but also point to emerging relational modes of accountability that privilege collective outcomes and mutual trust.
Building on these perspectives, and analysing the case of “Local Public Education Services” (SLEPs) in Chile, the third paper proposes a conceptual framework to understand the “middle tier” of education systems, demonstrating how intermediate agencies can act as strategic coordinators across technical, cultural, and political dimensions of change. Finally, the fourth paper shifts the lens to the school level, examining how practitioners in a U.S. charter school navigate hybrid governance reforms by cultivating trust and collective action amidst competing pressures.
Together, these studies provide critical insights into how shifting the scale and locus of educational governance can reshape the possibilities and challenges for school autonomy, collaboration, accountability, equity and systemic improvement.
This panel will have four 15 minute presentations and 15 minutes for questions and discussions between audience and presenters.

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