"Moving Through the Checkout Line"? Legal Standards, Performance, and State School Inspection Policy

• In Event: 66.057 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 66.057-1 - Legal Issues in Education

Abstract

This paper exemplifies how local state school inspection is used as means of evaluating legal compliance and assessment practices of school districts, school principals and individual teachers. As part of the rise of the “Audit Culture”, schools are increasingly subject to more complex methods of inquiry and inspection frameworks, including performance control. Drawing on the concepts of accountability and performativity, observations of inspection processes in Norwegian public schools are used as empirical examples, nested within an international research context. The paper demonstrates how use of fixed templates rigidly steer the inspection process in schools, where school inspectors are more geared towards completing the inspection process on task, rather than supporting schools in their struggle to comply with legal standards.

Author

• Jeffrey Brooks Hall, University of Oslo, Norway