Local quality work in an age of accountability – between autonomy and control

Bergh, Andreas

doi:10.1080/02680939.2015.1017612

Cited by 32 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…In Sweden, schools and school providers are obliged to organise and perform local quality work, a form of evaluation, to ensure constant improvement and thereby pass the assessment by the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (SSI)(e.g. Bergh 2015;Lundström 2015). The various steps in this evaluation discourse are presented and promoted as part of quality assurance work in an enormous number of documents, reports and webpages from the National Agency for Education (NAE) and the SSI (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teacher ambivalence towards school evaluation: promoting and ruining teacher professionalism

Hult

Edström

2016

Education Inquiry

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Today's evaluation society makes teachers participate in a stream of external evaluations. How teachers experience evaluation in school and how this affects their work and professionalism is the focus of this article. Teachers' views of external and internal evaluations and of the consequences for school practice are described and analysed. The interviewed teachers emphasised the importance of internal evaluations performed close to daily teaching practice and jointly with students and colleagues. These evaluations are generally overlooked in evaluation and school-policy research and seldom attended to or appreciated by school providers. Further, teachers were critical of and reported several negative consequences of accountability and external evaluations, but still generally complied by participating in them. The present results are discussed in relation to professional responsibility and accountability as well as to possible constitutive effects. By emphasising that their daily informal evaluations represent their efforts to improve teaching, teachers are describing parts of their professional responsibility. However, the negative consequences of external evaluations signal constitutive effects on teachers' work, described as making it less creative, discretionary and autonomous as well as increasing mistrust, meaning that more tests are required in order to legitimate student grades.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teacher ambivalence towards school evaluation: promoting and ruining teacher professionalism

Hult

Edström

2016

Education Inquiry

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“…Additionally, it raises the question: what will the consequences be? In his study about quality work at schools, Bergh (2015) stresses that the increased focus on control leads to paradoxical expectations at a local level. In relation to our study, this begs the question of how such a focus on responsibility-taking and accountability will affect the representatives of the municipal authorities and principals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, policy representations of quality in education might then rather be seen as political tools with quite diverse and often unintended effects. Policy research that focuses on such effects have in a Swedish context focussed on compulsory and upper secondary education (Bergh 2015;Carlbaum et al 2014;Lindgren, Hanberger, and Lundström 2016;Lundström 2017;Segerholm 2003) where it has been illustrated that the increased focus on measuring and evaluating activities in schools is complex and that the effects of it can be difficult to anticipate at both national and local levels. Some of these unintended effects concern increased administration and contradictory expectations on teachers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Lack of quality’ in Swedish adult education: a policy study

Mufic

Fejes

2020

Journal of Education Policy

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This article focuses on how 'problems' regarding quality in adult education are constituted as particular sorts of 'problems'. The analysis takes its point of departure in a poststructural analytic strategy called 'What's the problem represented to be?'. The material analysed consists of various policy documents concerning contemporary Swedish adult education. The results indicate that the concept of quality is described as being deficient and failing to address perceived challenges in adult education, namely the 'heterogenous student group' and 'varying preconditions for the organisation of education'. Thus, the concepts of flexibility and individualisation are introduced as a 'solution'. But at the same time, it is suggested in policy that the implementation of them has failed. In effect, representatives of the municipal authority and principals are held responsible and the need for more strict regulations and increased accountability in order to implement flexibility and individualisation in the adult education system are stressed in policy. Finally, the analysis of the policy documents leads to questions about the consequences for both school personnel and the students enrolled in adult education as the quality of the education seems to be assessed in relation to goal attainment and throughflow of students.

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“…Based on the institutional logics perspective and literature on accountability in education (e.g. Bergh, 2015;Mausethagen, 2013;Verger et al, 2019), the authors define the global accountability logic as symbolic and material practices, that are related to making visible and reporting students' learning outcomes to the public, and to interested social groups and individuals, by which school actors and schools provide meaning to their practices and organize their work in schools. In this article, the authors explore different aspects of the logic of accountability.…”

Section: Institutional Logics Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

National curriculum policy in Norway and Brazil

Silva

Parish

2020

NJCIE

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This paper addressed in what ways national curriculum policy in Norway and Brazil adopted the global accountability logic of which OECD and other international organizations are proponents. It borrowed from an institutional logics perspective to explain the complexity found within the accountability logic across these two nation-states. The method used was thematic analysis of the national curriculum policy. The findings revealed that national curriculum policy is informed by the international context, but translated within national contexts. Norway elaborated the accountability logic to encompass multiple aspects of this logic that reinforced each other to create a cohesive policy. In Brazil, tensions between different social groups resulted in a curriculum policy with contradictory aspects of the accountability logic. The translations of the global accountability logic reflected the context-specific features of each country and illustrated both homogeneity and heterogeneity that still exists in different educational contexts.

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Local quality work in an age of accountability – between autonomy and control

Cited by 32 publications

References 20 publications

Teacher ambivalence towards school evaluation: promoting and ruining teacher professionalism

Teacher ambivalence towards school evaluation: promoting and ruining teacher professionalism

‘Lack of quality’ in Swedish adult education: a policy study

National curriculum policy in Norway and Brazil

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