Cross-national convergence towards school autonomy with accountability? the role of politics and administrative traditions

• In Event: The Changing Dynamics of Global Education Reform: Globalization and Variation Mechanisms in a (Post-)Neoliberal Era

Proposal

School autonomy and performance-based accountability are at the center of contemporary reform debates. These policies tend to be conceived as inseparable since, presumably, governments are willing to give more autonomy to schools to the extent that the latter accept stricter supervision and accountability controls. IOs such as the OECD and the Work Bank conceive school autonomy with accountability policies as means to modernize and strengthen the effectiveness of educational systems. Nonetheless, despite the strong international emphasis behind such policies, it is not clear to what extent they have penetrated the everyday work of schools, and whether they do advance together.
This paper aims at analyzing the international trends towards the enactment of school autonomy and accountability policies across OECD countries, and at exploring the contextual factors associated with different levels of convergence. To this end, we rely on a mixed methods approach combining the quantitative analysis of cross-national data and in-depth interviews with national actors.
We first test the convergence hypothesis for different indices of school autonomy and accountability policies derived from the OECD’s PISA database. This database covers a time span of almost 20 years and offers a unique source to measure both the formal adoption of policies and their implementation at the school level. Considering data for 55 education systems, we first test the convergence hypothesis in relation to subgroups based on predefined attributes and then adopt a data-driven method to inductively identify factors playing a role in the formation of convergence clusters.
We find evidence on the convergence of autonomy policies with respect to staff, school budget or curriculum – but not with respect to market-driven accountability. Our results also point to a number of contextual determinants explaining these findings - most notably, the role of politico-administrative traditions. Countries known as New Public Management 'marketizers' (e.g. US or UK) do not present convergence over time, since they all have been showing high levels of data use since 2000. In contrast, so-called 'Neo-Weberian' states (predominantly found in continental Europe) show levels of convergence derived from an increase in certain uses of performance data, but more uneven trends regarding measures with the potential of threatening educational equity and teacher's professional status.
We delve into these patterns of uneven enactment on the basis of the qualitative data derived from the Reformed project database, which includes interviews to policy makers and key-stakeholders from a sample of countries. While the analysis of this data reinforces the explanatory power of institutional factors (including administrative and statehood traditions), it also illuminates the key role of domestic politics. Interviews show that political bargaining, contestation/veto dynamics and the political orientation of national and local governments have a determining role in explaining the uneven expansion of autonomy and accountability policies.
By combining a political economy perspective with quantitative methods, our paper grapples with the interplay of political and institutional factors mediating in the adoption and enactment of accountability with autonomy reforms. In this way, it sheds light on ongoing dynamics of policy convergence/divergence in the field of global education policy.

Authors

• Gerard Ferrer-Esteban, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Clara Fontdevila, Universitat Autònoma De Barcelona