The importance given to education today and the attention to its evaluation and quality improvement, connected with the need for more adequate models for school management, are the basis for this research paper. In the last decades, school performance management or, simply, school evaluation has become a current issue in a lot of countries, with an increasing interest of scientific and political areas (Lafond, 1998; Clímaco, 2002). Actually, the literature is very rich in its discussion on how measure school performance, despite some gaps mainly at the level of school performance management practices, which is precisely what we expect to explore, through case studies of secondary school’s performance management practices.

Undoubtedly, the debate about how to measure performance management is highly extensive on the number of authors, books, articles.

Bouckaert and Halligan (2008) chart the evolution of performance management models in the public sector and their impact on public sector organizations. They provide an analytic framework for understanding performance management in the public sector. In their analysis, they distinguish between the measurement, the incorporation, and the use of performance, and show that as performance management systems evolve, the emphasis given to each phase moves from the measurement, to the incorporation, and finally to the use of performance for improvement.

In this way, performance management includes three main elements: measurement (collection of information on organization performance), incorporation (reporting of organizational performance information to organizational stakeholders), and use (utilization of organizational performance information for decision making). One of our main goals is to analyze the performance management practices of schools, in the relation to the above three main elements, i.e., understand how schools measure its performance, report it and use it for improvement purposes (Bouckaert and Halligan, 2008).

The development of appropriate techniques of performance measurement in education raises a number of questions that deserve being researched (Mayston, 2003). One important property that any model of performance measurement should have, and that should be considered, is the need to adequately account for the differences in resources and in the characteristics of the cohorts of students that each school faces. The utilization of aggregate exam results, not adjusted for these differences, will unduly favour schools that receive pupils from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds.

While few would defend that schools, more than social circumstances, determine school success, the difference that the schools make seems to be substantial enough to raise the possibility that different school performance management practices can lead to improvement, educational excellence and ultimately widen equity (Dimmock, 1993; Cheng, 1996).

These type of questions arose here are crucial to our ongoing research, which aims to understand performance management practices of schools and how they contribute to school achievement, mainly through a more deeply analysis of those practices, i.e., using a qualitative case study approach.

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