School inspection in Germany has been implemented after the so called PISA-shock in 2001. Due to the educational sovereignty of the German federal states, each state embarked on setting up their own inspection system. Although they bear strong familiarities, they are by no means identical (Dedering & Müller, 2011). Therefore, two contrasting inspection systems – Lower Saxony and Thuringia – have been selected for a comparative case study (Stake, 2000) to investigate similarities and differences of inspectors’ evaluation work in two policy contexts. School inspection is conceptualised as an intermediate actor between the policy actors and school-based actors (Brüsemeister, 2007). The stakeholders at different levels of the school system are presumed to have diverging expectations regarding evaluation priorities and evaluation practice of school inspection teams (Sowada, in press). While school inspection teams have substantial freedoms in their conduct of actual inspections, they nonetheless have to account for diverging expectations in their environment. How they do this, is the focus of this presentation. On a fundamental level, different value comparisons are theorised as a basic operation that enables evaluative decision making (Heintz, 2010). The official inspection frameworks prescribe fixed orders of worth to school inspection teams. Yet, the therein contained inspection criteria, while providing some guidance, do not fully determine the inspection process (Sadler, 2009). Therefore, it remains an empirical question what value comparisons are used in specifying, supplementing or replacing the values inscribed in the official framework during actual school inspections. Three school inspection teams in each state have been shadowed during an on-site inspection. Voice recordings of their internal discussions have been obtained and analysed with methods of discussion analysis (Deppermann, 2008). Additionally, episodic interviews with inspectors and other stakeholders have been conducted. In line with qualitative heuristics, the data sets have been analysed for similarities within and across the data sets (Kleining, 2005, pp. 28–29). The findings show that the inspection procedures in both states create different opportunities and challenges for the evaluation work of inspection teams. Additionally, new and unforeseen circumstances at a school can create obstacles to the inspectors’ decision making routine. The inspectors respond with adaptive strategies that allow them to flexibly adjust to challenges such as mismatches between standardised policies and procedures and idiosyncratic situations encountered at schools. When resolving unusual challenges to their evaluation work, inspection team members do flexibly draw on heterarchical orders of worth to argue their case and facilitate decision-making.

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