Performance-based accountability (PBA) policies have become central in the governance of educational systems worldwide. In the field of education, these policies commonly consist of the evaluation of students’ performance through large-scale standardized tests, to which consequences of a different nature are tied (material and symbolic, individual and collective), which are faced by school actors (Verger et al., 2019). The idea behind this policy approach is that being held accountable and facing consequences will generate pressure, which will move actors towards accomplishing the requested performance goals more efficiently (Chiang, 2009). Research on PBA in education has long considered material consequences as generating more pressure, and therefore as having stronger behavioral effects, compared to symbolic ones, i.e., consequences merely associated with the visibility of test results (Au, 2007). Nonetheless, more recently, studies have found that symbolic consequences also have the potential to generate high levels of performative pressure and can trigger similar behavioral responses as material ones (Thiel et al., 2017; Authors, forthcoming). Reputational concerns seem to play a crucial role in explaining this. Research on public accountability in general has recently also highlighted the importance of deepening our understanding of the “reputational basis” of public accountability (Busuioc and Lodge, 2015; 2016). Reputational concerns, however, remain underexplored in the educational literature, in particular in non-marketized contexts. In this study, we conduct a comparative study of the role of reputation in explaining accountability concerns in different policy contexts: Catalonia, Chile and Norway. These three cases differ in terms of the consequences associated with PBA, but also in other aspects (school choice, students´ enrolment and/or teachers´ recruitment policies, school actors´ working conditions, etc.). Our aim is to explore and analyze to what extent, how and why reputation matters for school actors by taking into account the complex interplay between accountability policy settings and other issues related with contextual factors and other educational policies. Our comparative analysis relies primarily on qualitative data based on in-depth interviews with school principals and teachers in all three policy settings. The findings provide key insights in terms of the extent to which, how and why reputational concerns are related to accountability matters. By highlighting both a number of general/universal trends in terms of how reputational concerns are experienced, and by identifying various context-specific mechanisms that influence the extent and impact of reputation concerns in different policy settings, the paper contributes to the existing literature on reputation and accountability.

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