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.

The education debate has two separate but intertwined dimensions when it comes to power relations: First, it represents an important arena for the ideological struggle in the recontextualising field to set the rules for constructing pedagogic texts in the schools (which forms the context of this study). Second, it represents a form of pedagogic communication on its own terms between transmitters (education authorities) and acquirers (the public), which is what the focus of the analysis will be. In other words, the responses to critique constitute one way of educating the public in terms of what counts as legitimate and illegitimate communication and thereby regulating the legitimate discourse. To analyse how power and control function, the concepts recognition and realisation rules are employed. Recognition and realisation rules are what establish the communicative context (cf. Bernstein 1990, 34-35). Recognition rules refer to power relations, and to how voice is to be reproduced through the limits of the legitimate potential of the communication. This is regulated by the classificatory principle. Classification indicates how one context differs from another and ´provides the key to the distinguishing feature of a context, and so orients the speaker to what is expected, what is legitimate to that´ (Bernstein 2000, 17), and can refer to relations between contexts, agents, discourses or practices. The realisation rules refer to the interactional principle, or the rules for what counts as legitimate communication, and thereby establish what counts as legitimate texts. They regulate the message, or the form of the contextual realisation, and are a function of the framing. When analysing framing, attention in this context is given to three elements: 1) selection, referring to how the content of the critique is given attention/ignored, 2) criteria, referring to how the content of the critique is legitimated or rejected, and 3) the hierarchy between transmitter and acquirer, referring to how the education authorities position themselves and the critics in a social order and address expectations about roles and legitimate behaviour. Case: Conservative-governed municipalities in Norway Education authorities from two Norwegian municipalities (Oslo and Sandefjord) are in focus in this study. Under conservative governing these municipalities implemented strong performance management and they received a lot of critique in the media. The data material consists of the education authorities´ responses to the critique (20 responses from Oslo and 20 from Sandefjord).

While neoliberalism often is presented as the ideology of freedom, the question is whether it represents freedom when it comes to responding to critique (Willig 2016). The education authorities’ responses in both municipalities are strongly framed in the selection, criteria and hierachy dimensions, implying strongly framed realisation rules when it comes to what counts as legitimate forms of communication, based on strongly classified recognition rules that in turn are based on the neoliberal discourse. In other words, the education authorities educate the public that there are few, if any, legitimate grounds or forms of critisism of test-based accountability systems, and assume authorititarian roles. As is argued elsewhere, instead of the result-based management stimulating engagement about the quality of schools, it rather serves to de-intellectualise and de-politicise the education field and to shut off discussions about schooling through demonstrating evidence of “efficiency” (e.g. Apple 2006; Ball 2013). The education authorities often use the good results as evidence for rejecting criticism. To conclude, the education authorities’ responses to critique in Oslo and Sandefjord could play a role in how and why critical framing of test-based accountability is losing ground in the media coverage. The strong classification of what counts as legitimate pedagogic discourse combined with framing demonstrating how the education authorities’ turn a deaf ear to criticism, and how the responses are often directed as individual and personal critique of the critics, could potentially silence critical voices. Whether the response strategies illuminated here are relevant for other media contexts (both nationally and internationally) where the neoliberal discourse is challenged needs further investigation.

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