Performance-based accountability (PBA) has become a central instrument of school assessment, monitoring and improvement in European countries. This instrument has a great potential of shaping school organizational decisions and educational practices. PBA has cognitive and normative influence by framing policy representations, problematization processes and power games (Maroy and Pons, 2019). Educational literature documents how PBA has occasionally generated the conditions for improving students’ learning outcomes, but also numerous undesired side-effects, including the intensification of test preparation, curriculum narrowing and the adoption of non-inclusive practices in the classroom (Cohen-Vogel, 2011). Research also brings to the fore that teachers and other school actors creatively interpret and respond to PBA, generating inconsistencies between regulatory expectations and the context of practice (Hardy 2014).
Our study starts from the theoretical assumption that the way teachers respond to policy prerogatives such as PBA is contingent on how these actors make sense of performance pressures within their broader social and institutional environments (Jabbar & Creed, 2020).
Educational systems vary importantly in the way they regulate the teaching profession and in the procedures they put in place to monitor and guarantee quality education. We argue that these institutional features inevitably mediate the way PBA is enacted. At a more local level, we argue that the position that schools occupy in their local education markets is also crucial to uncover how teachers negotiate and process external pressures, and with what outcomes in terms of organization and educational practices.
Part of the REFORMED project (www.reformedproject.eu), this research is unique in its attempt to unravel, from a cross-national perspective, the social mechanisms and conditions favouring different school reactions to PBA. The research follows a sequential mixed-methods design approach which integrates two different empirical stages. The first stage relies on an international database that includes questionnaire data administered to teachers (n = 3403) and school leaders (n= 625) from randomly sampled urban schools in Norway, Chile and Spain - countries that enact different PBA policies which vary in their density (thicker and thinner), and direction (vertical and horizontal). In the second research stage, we conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers (n=76) and school leaders (n=73) in the three countries.
