Internationally, neoliberal school reforms include standardised testing as one tool used to facilitate monitoring in accountability systems and to marketise education. Ball (2013, p. 137) defines performativity as a ´key mechanism of neoliberal governance that uses comparisons and judgements, and self-management, in place of interventions and direction´. In creating a performativity culture, standardised testing is one tool used to facilitate monitoring in accountability systems and to marketise education through New-Public-Management inspired measures (focus on output, incentives linked to results, introduction of quasi-markets and competition) (Clarke and Newman 1997).
In the forming of a pedagogic discourse, ´[t]he distributive rules mark and distribute who may transmit what to whom and under what conditions, and they attempt to set the outer limits of legitimate discourse´ (Bernstein 2000, p. 31). According to Bernstein (2000), the field of production of discourse is increasingly state controlled. Bearing this in mind, arenas outside of state control, such as the media, can be key for actors that aim to challenge, but also to reinforce the dominant discourse (Baroutis 2016).
Some important findings in the international research literature are that media coverage of standardised testing has been increasing (Camphuijsen and Levatino 2022) and that media reportage on it often reinforces rather than challenges the neoliberal discourse and accountability practices (Baroutis 2016; Yemini and Gordon 2017). This is important when it comes to influencing public opinion as it is found that ´one-sided messages emphasising either positive or negative aspects of an issue can change peoples’ preferences´ (Chong and Druckman 2010, p. 1).
Attention in research has often been on the general media coverage and conflicting arguments related to standardised testing and test-based accountability, whereas little attention has been given to how power can play out through the form of the communication and thereby contribute to regulating the public debate. It is important to examine the education authorities’ responses to critique on this issue because ´the response sets the limits for what can be expressed´ (Willig 2016, 29, my translation).
With this as the point of departure, the aim of this paper is to investigate
how education authorities frame the education debate on test-based accountability through their responses to critique in media and thereby educate the public on what they count as legitimate communication
It has been found that non-Anglophone contexts are under-researched, especially when it comes to the issue of how national testing is covered in the media (Camphuijsen and Levatino 2022). To contribute to more research in this area, Norway is the context that will be in focus here.
Since the national tests were introduced in Norway in 2004, the controversies related to their implementation, quality, use and problematic effects have continued (Camphuijsen et al. 2021; Camphuijsen and Levatino 2022; author). What is interesting, however, is that over time, critical perspectives are found to be losing ground in the media coverage (Camphuijsen and Levatino 2022).
When it comes to heated media debates on test-based accountability, two municipalities (Oslo, the capital, and Sandefjord, a small rural municipality with about 45 000 inhabitants) stand out in the national context. For this reason they have been chosen for closer scrutiny below. At the time the debates were raging, both Oslo and Sandefjord had had a conservative municipal government. This fact clearly anchors the political leadership in the neoliberal ideology, which is especially interesting when it comes to investigating how power is exercised when important features of the neoliberal discourse is challenged.