In educational research, performance-based accountability (PBA) systems have often been likened to ‘pressure cookers’ (cf. Agrey, 2004; Perryman et al., 2011). PBA puts high levels of pressure on schools by holding them liable for their performance, sanctioning underachievement and rewarding success. With high-stakes accountability systems in particular, underperforming schools experience higher levels of pressure, since continuous low performance has significant implications, from having restrictions placed on schools’ pedagogic, organizational and economic autonomy to being forced into closure (Diamond, 2012). By exerting these and other types of pressures, PBA is expected to make schools more responsive to the achievement of centrally defined learning goals and more inclined to use learning metrics in their daily practices and/or organisational decisions. Overall, PBA policies aim to schools more consciously aligning their instruction with the mandated curriculum, and more intensively using achievement data to identify learning gaps and define educational and organizational improvement programs. Through the promotion of these changes, PBA systems not only aim to improve learning achievement in aggregated terms but also to ensure that schools (especially underperforming schools) pay sufficient attention to their most disadvantaged students. Although the expectations with PBA are high, the impact of PBA on school organizations is rather uneven. The paper identifies and analyzes varying school responses to accountability pressures in Chilean education by paying particular attention to the role of subjective variables in policy enactment. Specifically, on the basis of a mixed-methods study, we analyze how school actors’ interpretations of and dispositions toward performance-based accountability (PBA), on the one hand, and their experienced levels of pressure, on the other, influence how they respond to the accountability regulatory system. As we will show, the responses to PBA that have been identified by crossing these two factors go beyond conventional alignment-decoupling dichotomy and include a more varying range of options, such as fabrication, de facto opting out, accommodation, induced alignment and dilution. Our perspective is premised on the assumption that the way school actors respond to policy prerogatives is contingent on the way these actors make sense of PBA pressures and expectations within their broader social and institutional frameworks. In other words, the responses to PBA that we identify are the result of analyzing how school actors see and live accountability regulations in their reference contexts.

Agrey, L. (2004). The Pressure Cooker in Education: Standardized Assessment and High-Stakes. Canadian Social Studies, 38(3), 1-12. Diamond, J.B. (2012). Accountability policy, school organization, and classroom practice: Partial recoupling and educational opportunity. Education and Urban Society, 44(2), 151-182. Perryman, J., Ball, S., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2011). Life in the pressure cooker–School league tables and English and mathematics teachers’ responses to accountability in a results-driven era. British Journal of Educational Studies, 59(2), 179-195.