In 2009, the state of Lower-Austria implemented a school reform which builds on two aspects: on the one hand, it retains the national competence standards framework, and, on the other hand, it highlights its efforts for an inclusive school culture that tries to limit marginalization. The main reform measures are the abolishment of ability groups, a focus on team- and individualized teaching, and provision of additional resources for the support of low-achieving students. As a part of the evaluation project “NOESIS”, I investigated the students’ “lived experience of schooling” by using the “Lived Experience”-approach of van Manen (1990). The data consist of 21 narrative interviews with students from seven different schools and seek to answer the question of how a “paradigm of individualization,” which has been created by school accountability tools, can be marginalizing for students who experience a mismatch between the characteristics of their world at home and the expectations at school. The study is based on the argument that competencies are dispositional constructs which neglect an individual’s external conditions of realizing content matter (“Verwirklichungsbedingungen”) (Otto & Schrödter, 2010). Drawing on Biesta (2009) and Young (2010), I argue that current discourse on school accountability tools, such as competence standards and assessment tests, has created a “paradigm of individualization” that highlights each student’s individual performance and makes the increase of this performance the main task of education. Based on a life-world phenomenological concept of learning and schooling (Schütz, 2010; Langeveld, 1960), my empirical study investigates how students experience their daily life at school. The analysis shows that students experience schooling mainly as working on given tasks, and in most schools, students have developed mechanistic notions of learning. Furthermore, they feel a strong need to get in touch with their teachers, who should “be there” for them, and they believe in traditional, self-referred concepts of attainment. These three results apply especially to schools which feel pressured to reach basic levels of qualification, and which are attended by students with heterogeneous learning needs. Their focus on individualized teaching leaves the students to their own devices and provides no room for the process of meaning-making, in which students draw on their stock of previous experience (Schütz, 2010) in order to give meaning to what they experience in class. Education, in terms of guiding the students’ pathways, remains reserved for schools which do not have to be concerned about their performance on competence tests.

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