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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REFORMED (Reforming Schools Globally: A Multi-Scalar Analysis of Autonomy and Accountability Policies in the Education Sector)

Teaser

Summary

In the last decades, most countries in the world have faced major pressures to reform their educational systems. The emerging demand for global skills, the challenges generated by technological innovation, and the comparisons and rankings of educational systems generated by international large-scale assessments, stand out among other sources of pressure. In this scenario, managerial policies, usually imported from the private sector, have disseminated widely due to their promise to modernize and strengthen the performance of education systems in an effective way. In compulsory education, the two policy ideas of managerial nature that have acquired more centrality are the devolution of responsibilities to smaller management units (known as â€˜school autonomyâ€™) and outcomes-based management through accountability schemes. In the REFORMED project we refer to the combination of these two policies as School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA).

The project analyses the global spread and enactment of SAWA policies in the educational sector. Specifically, the project inquiries into how and why are SAWA policies being adopted and re-formulated by policy actors operating at multiple scales, and examines the institutional frameworks, enactment processes and other contextual contingencies that contribute to SAWA policies affecting the performance of education systems in one sense or another. At the country level, the project is being developed in a carefully selected sample of countries: The Netherlands, Norway, Chile and Spain.

The project is structured into two main research strands. In the first research strand, we focus on the global dissemination and adoption of SAWA policies at the regulatory level, whereas in the second research strand, we focus on the enactment of SAWA policies at the level of practice. These two research strands are interconnected because the way SAWA is regulated (in terms of policy design, types of incentives distributed among school actors, etc.) is expected to affect how the SAWA policy mandate is interpreted and translated into the daily practices of teachers and principals. The results of the project will contribute to reducing uncertainty within education reform processes and will promote evidence-based decisions on whether and how to use different types of SAWA modalities to improve the quality of education systems without undermining their equity and diversity.

Work performed

In the context of Research Strand 1, which focuses on policy dissemination, we have conducted country case studies on the adoption of SAWA in Norway, The Netherlands, Spain and Chile. We have also conducted a systematic literature review of SAWA reforms that shows that, internationally, SAWA is adopted for very different reasons and advances in a way that is markedly conditioned by prevailing politico-administrative regimes. In some contexts, SAWA advances as the result of the sedimentation and layering of different instruments, techniques and tools that are not necessarily articulated in a predefined reform program. In fact, we identify numerous cases where, with the passage of time, national standardised assessments and test-based accountability systems become autonomous entities and adopt functions that were not initially foreseen. Overall, our findings in this first research strand challenge assumptions on normative emulation as the main mechanism of education policy dissemination, and institutional isomorphism (i.e. the tendency of educational systems to adopt a similar form) as the main outcome of policy dissemination processes. Thus, even when similar policy discourses and policy instruments are being adopted internationally, the rationales behind the selection of these instruments, their final configuration and uses, and the administrative capacity to retain and implement them are strongly mediated by national institutions and political contingencies.

In the context of Research Strand 2, which focuses on how SAWA policies are enacted at the school level, we have designed a new survey instrument to measure how teachers and school principals perceive, interpret and respond to the SAWA mandate in their daily practices. The survey will capture productive uses of SAWA instruments at both the level of school organisation and pedagogy, but also includes so-called survey experiments as a way to detect the emergence of possible undesired or opportunistic behaviours among school actors in the context of increasing levels of accountability and autonomy.

Final results

Reformed aims to address a disciplinary gap in educational reform studies between quantitative impact evaluations and qualitative implementation studies. To the purpose of promoting cross-fertilisation between these two approaches, the project will generate a unique international data base on educational reform that contemplates subjective and contextual variables, some of which have not been systematically measured yet in educational research. These include school principals\' and teachers\' attitudes toward students\' wellbeing, the policy preferences of school actors, or their professional expectations. In terms of contextual variables, we contemplate the market dynamics and the socio-economic characteristics of the local spaces where schools operate.

Our research strategy has been designed to analyse how both subjective and contextual variables interact in the production of educational change, and how these dynamics operate both internationally and within countries. This is something that will permit to study education policy implementation at a scale that is unusual in conventional implementation studies. At the same time, our methodological strategy is grounded on two basic premises that econometric models tend to override: first, that, to find out whether a policy model works or not, we also need to explore if such a model is being understood, accepted and enacted correctly by policy actors; and second, that actorsâ€™ attitudes and responses to new policy mandates do not result from pre-given attributes, but are strongly shaped by the institutional, normative and regulatory context where actors are embedded.

The international and comparative perspective of the study will allow to understand how and under what circumstances the same global policy mandate (i.e. SAWA) might generate different responses at the school level. In some cases, SAWA might trigger school improvement and education inclusion dynamics, whereas in other cases it might generate system segmentation and discriminatory practices. Beyond the international comparison potential of the project, our data will also allow us to analyze how market pressures or the socio-economic composition of schools contribute to the same SAWA system generating different â€“ and even diverging â€“ responses in the same country setting.

Much has been written about the undesired effects of high stakes accountability policies â€“ those that involve material incentives and different forms of punishment for underperforming actors. However, our unique research design, which permits comparisons between countries and within countries, will allow us to test whether soft accountability policies might also generate unexpected or undesired responses among school actors due to the reputational and symbolic effects they involve.