To align or not to align: the enactment of accountability and data-use in disadvantaged school contexts
- PDF / 500,047 Bytes
- 28 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 72 Downloads / 171 Views
To align or not to align: the enactment of accountability and data-use in disadvantaged school contexts Lluís Parcerisa 1 Received: 14 March 2020 / Accepted: 28 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Despite the growing number of researches about performance-based accountability (PBA) in education, there is still scarce evidence on the mediating role of subjective variables (e.g., perceived pressure and alignment to PBA mandates) in the enactment of PBA in socially disadvantaged contexts. This is paradoxical because marginalized schools are usually those that are on probation and have to cope with the threat of sanctions more frequently. Existing investigations on PBA enactment have put increasing attention to the role of situated and material contexts, but there is still limited knowledge on how subjective variables can mediate policy enactment processes and enable the adoption of different school responses. To address these gaps, the article aims to explore how the perceived accountability pressure, the school performative culture, and meaning-making processes at the school level are mediating the enactment of PBA policies in disadvantaged schools. At the theoretical level, the study is informed by sense-making and policy enactment frameworks. Methodologically speaking, the investigation uses a comparative case study approach based on two extreme cases, which have been selected on the basis of a factorial analysis that combines both survey and secondary data. The extreme cases represent two different scenarios, which, despite operating in similar situated contexts, are characterized by having opposite levels of perceived pressure and alignment with the performative culture. The case studies combine survey data (n = 39) with documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with the management team and teachers (n = 7). The findings show that subjective variables, in interaction with other contextual factors, can exacerbate or inhibit PBA regulatory pressures and trigger diverging school responses. Keywords Policy enactment . Sense-making theory . Performance-based accountability .
Standardized tests . Performative culture
* Lluís Parcerisa [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability
1 Introduction In recent years, performance-based accountability (PBA) policies have been disseminated globally as a “best practice” by different international organizations such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Lingard et al. 2015; Verger and Parcerisa 2018). PBA instruments are being adopted in numerous educational settings around the world with the intention of modernizing governance, strengthening school effectiveness, and reducing learning gaps among different social groups. In Chile, PBA instruments were implemented in the context of a profound market-driven educational reform, introduced in the 1980s (Diaz Rios 2018; Gysling 2016; Verger et al. 2019) but cur
Data Loading...