Enacting performance-based accountability in a Southern European school system: between administrative and market logics

Abstract

Performance-based accountability (PBA) policies are increasingly adopted in a wide range of education systems in order to reform school governance and to improve students' results and schools' performance. Countries around the world have been implementing national large-scale assessments to make school actors more accountable and responsible for students' results. This policy model has been generalized in countries with different administrative traditions, including those with a short tradition in New Public Management. This is the case in Spain, where PBA has been adopted unevenly in different regions, with Madrid being one of the earliest adopters. In recent decades, Madrid has developed a model that combines administrative test-based accountability with a system of broad parental school choice, which also facilitates the activation of market forms of accountability. However, the combination and interaction between market and administrative forms of accountability is understudied. This paper adopts a policy enactment perspective to analyze, through a case study approach, the interaction of administrative and market forms of accountability and its enactment at the school level. The case study is based on a set of 41 semi-structured interviews with teachers, principals, and school inspectors in a sample of eight schools in Madrid, combined with document analysis of school educational projects and improvement plans. The evidence suggests that administrative and market forms of accountability tend to generate dynamics of interdependence, resulting in increasing external pressures which schools tend to address with superficial responses, including teaching to the test, or second-order competition between schools.

Cuasimercados, rendición de cuentas e innovación: analizando el caso de las Escuelas Libres en Inglaterra desde la perspectiva de los docentes

“…Teachers' autonomy is bounded by the school ethos, which includes its view on teaching and learning, curriculum design, and organizational norms, but also the leadership stance about PBA (Coburn, 2001;Gawlik, 2015). Similar to what happens in Chile, schools whose culture clashes with PBA demands tend to dilute the pressure on exams (Verger et al, 2020), making teachers feel less concerned about results (Pagès, 2021). On the other hand, teachers in School A and the no-excuses approach were aligned with England's 'self-improving' logic, seeing exams as integral to both their professional activity but also students' learning.…”

Teacher autonomy in the age of performance-based accountability: A review based on teaching profession regulatory models (2017-2020)

“…In Sothern European contexts and regions, such as Madrid, the increasing pressures of administrative and market accountability generated diverse school responses, affecting key elements of teacher professionalism (including an increasing focus on teaching to the test, or the alignment between external accountability instruments and internal evaluative tools). Furthermore, data use practices associated with PBA were often only adopted ceremoniously; decoupling formal structures from actual school and professional practices (Pagès, 2021). Not coincidentally, Madrid is one of the regions in Spain where teachers are more critical of external evaluations and new forms of accountability (Monarca & Fernández-Agüero, 2018).…”

‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)’: School-level enactment of an educational innovation policy in Barcelona

“….] without internalizing relevant changes into day-to-day practices’ (Pagès, 2021: 539). De-coupling may thus be the result of conflicting and contradictory demands and coercive pressures, the different actors’ subjective beliefs regarding the efficacy of certain policy paradigms and, more broadly, school actors’ agentic dispositions and constraints (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2017; Coburn, 2005).…”