Schools, Markets and New Governance Instruments: The variegated enactments of Test-Based Accountability in Chilean Education

• In Event: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Accountability and Datafication in Education: Global Perspectives

Proposal

Chile is one of the countries in Latin America that has experienced for longer with external evaluations as a means to promote school competition, assure educational quality and held schools accountable. This paper analyzes how test-based accountability (TBA) is being enacted in Chile and to what extent it generates unexpected and opportunistic responses (namely students’ selection and cheating) at the school level. The paper also analyzes whether these responses differ according to school characteristics and contextual factors.
TBA policies have globalized despite there is still unclarity on what are the practical implications of these policies at the school level. TBA has generated passionate debates in educational research with some researchers considering that these policies boost learning achievement and promote curriculum alignment, whereas other researchers focus on the negative consequences of these policies (teaching to the test, cheating, cream-skimming) (Hamilton, et al., 2002). Policy design variables (such as the level of stakes attached to external evaluations) are important elements to understand differential school responses to TBA.
In our perspective, the effects of TBA are critically mediated by the school context and, in particular, by the position that schools occupy in the hierarchy of the local educational market. Local educational markets are geographical spaces where schools have a relationship of competition and interdependence (Maroy and van Zanten, 2009). We hypothesize that the position of schools in their LEM strategically mediates the generation of more expressive or instrumental responses to external accountability pressures (Lingard, et al, 2013).
School actors are not usually willing to report on undesired behaviors, reason why we adopt a survey experiment approach in a survey administered to both principals (n=200) and teachers (n=4000) in the three biggest urban areas of Chile. The survey experiment for teachers is based on a vignette approach (Atzmüller and Steiner, 2010) and measures to what extent and under what institutional conditions teachers would be likely to cheat when national exams are administered. The survey experiment for principals is based on a novel conjoint design (Hainmueller et al. 2014) that measures to what extent the selection of the most academically skilled students is considered by principals as a way to booster the test results of their school.

Authors

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Antonina Levatino, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Lluís Parcerisa, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona