Most countries in the world are facing reform pressures to make their education systems more effective, innovative and responsive to the new challenges generated by the global economy. In this scenario, managerial policy ideas such as school autonomy and accountability, which aim to modernize public education and strengthen its performance, are spreading broadly (De Grauwe 2005). To date, a wide range of countries with different administrative traditions and levels of development have adopted school autonomy with accountability (SAWA) policies, whilst the most active international organizations in the education sector, like the OECD, are strongly promoting these policies globally (Breakspear 2012). SAWA has become a global model of education reform despite scholarly research has achieved inconclusive and mixed findings concerning the SAWA effects on learning outcomes and equity. To a great extent, the difficulty of reaching more conclusive and generalisable results is related to the context-dependent nature of SAWA interventions (Glewwe 2014). This paper, on the basis of a systematic literature review methodology, reflects on which types of SAWA policies under which contextual and institutional circumstances might generate the expected results in terms of educational quality and equity. This review does not only focus on research looking at the final results of SAWA policies (i.e. impact evaluations), but also focuses on research looking at how these policies are being perceived, received and enacted by educational actors at the local/school level (which is a type of research usually grounded on qualitative and ethnographic methods). Among other things, the paper shows that especially high-stakes configurations of SAWA are conducive to a range of unintended and opportunistic logics of action among schools, which derive in practices such as cream-skimming, teaching to the test, educational triage and narrowing the curriculum. These logics of action and the resulting practices at the school level, despite are still understudied, have significant direct and indirect effects on educational systems in terms of both equity and quality.

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