Recent reforms in England and the USA give evidence that teaching methods and content can change rapidly, given a strong external pressure, for example through economic incentives, inspections, school choice, and public display of schools’ and pupils’ performances. Educational activities in the Scandinavian countries have increasingly become dominated by obligations regarding assessment and grading. A common thread is the demand for equal and just assessment and grading through clear criteria and transparent processes. Torrance states that clarity in assessment procedures, processes, and criteria has underpinned widespread use of coaching, practice, and provision of formative feedback to boost achievement, but that such transparency encourages instrumentalism. He concludes that the practice of assessment has moved from assessment of learning, through assessment for learning, to assessment as learning, with “assessment procedures and practices coming completely to dominate the learning experience” and “criteria compliance” replacing “learning”. Thus, formative assessment, in spite of its proven educational potential, threatens to be deformative. In this article we will explore to what extent and how this development is visible in two cases, presenting music education in one Norwegian and one Swedish compulsory school setting. Three thematic threads run through this exploration: quality, power, and instrumentalism.

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gement at BI Norwegian Business School. She has published books and articles on cultural policy, cultural entrepreneurship, cultural leadership, and the role of artists. Røyseng sits on the editorial board of several journals in sociology and cultural policy studies and is chair of the Scientific Committee of the International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR).

This article outlines and discusses various aspects of quality and value in children's music.Quality is defined as something performative-that is, characteristics within the aesthetic object that gain significance and value through interaction with listening subjects. The article argues that the judgment of quality in music is always relative, depending on the listener and the criteria in play, and when it comes to children's music, a variety of participating subjects and possible criteria could be involved. This pluralistic, relativistic concept of quality allows the author to theoretically examine quality perceptions of children's music by employing different sets of criteria significant to the aesthetic object and its various functions and, philosophically, through the viewpoints of different agents in the field of children's music. Through this analytical exercise, the article contributes to the categorization and understanding of various logics underpinning normative judgments of children's music.

In this chapter, we discuss the ambivalent experiences of gender that we find present among musicians working in Norway. Even if the field of music of today is more inclusive and equal than before, musicians still face certain gendered practices and structures in their professional careers. Through the theoretical concept of ambivalence (Ashforth et al., 2014; Bauman, 1991; Merton, 1976), we here identify three ambivalences related to gender: 1) ambivalent roles and positions, 2) discursive ambivalence, and 3) ambivalence in visibility. Finally, we discuss how ambivalent experiences leads to different responses and actions among musicians in different areas within the field of music.