During the last three decades, education governance has seen unprecedented changes globally. Similar to the intensification of the evidence-based policy paradigm across a wide and increasing range of policy arenas, education governance has come to rely progressively more on intense data collection and data-driven policy instruments, which national governments adopt in an attempt to steer increasingly fragmented, complex and multi-layered education systems from a distance. As the last thirty years evidently show, this governance trend has meant the adoption of international and national large-scale comparative assessments, the adoption of common learning standards and, more generally, the predominance of test-based or performance-based accountability (PBA) systems.

PBA focuses on the measurement of students' performance through large-scale assessments that are increasingly relying on digital technologies and computer adaptive forms of testing (Williamson 2019). Although largely presented as future-oriented, efficient and progressive, such assessments have had significant unintended (or in some cases intended) consequences on the governance of teachers, schools and curricula. This form of accountability aims at making schools more oriented toward the delivery of quantitatively measurable and active performance management, and is persistently promoted by some of the most dominant international organizations in the education policy field, such as the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank.

As part of the global trend of PBA, school-level education actors, including teachers and principals, are expected to be more open and responsive to external judgment about their work and results. PBA and external evaluations are becoming increasingly relevant in framing educational policies at the regulatory level, and in configuring instructional and organizational strategies at the school and classroom levels (Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti, 2013). PBA is expected to generate both new forms of performative pressure and new sources of data that school actors are expected to use to address learning gaps and promote instructional improvement.

The World Yearbook of Education 2021 focuses on understanding the constitution of PBA as a global model of education governance. This double-symposium will include presentations that correspond to different perspectives that the World yearbook adopts to PBA as a globalizing policy phenomenon. One the one hand, some of the contributions will analyze the dynamics through which PBA has been constructed as a global policy model, and disseminated internationally, and will pay particular attention to the growing commercial interests around PBA and the digitalization of learning assessments. One the other hand, some of the presentations will focus on the various ways of enactments of these policies, when it comes to the school and education practice level. Special attention is given here to the interplay between discourses, actors strategies and the various instruments of the policy enacted in the everyday life of teachers and schools. Contributions will include comparative approaches to the study of the PBA phenomenon, as a way to find out how and to what extent accountability policy performs differently according to the institutional, political and socio-economic environments where it is implemented.

Lingard, B., Martino, W., Rezai-Rashti, G., & Sellar, S. (2015). Globalizing educational accountabilities. Routledge. Williamson, B. (2019). Datafication of Education. Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Principles and Practices of Design, In Helen Beetham, Rhona Sharpe (ed) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Principles and Practices of Design. NY: Routledge