The international discourse on new educational regulation policies seems to move from concepts of “governing” or “steering” to the concepts of “governance”, which first of all indicates the insight that development is not caused by unilateral means but is a complex, multi-level and (multi-)mediated process in which often transintentional effects follow intentional actions (Altrichter 2010). Therefore the concept of governance points to the reductionist moment of ideas of direct steering and focuses on modes and mechanisms for coordination of action within the educational system.

Governance analysis aspires to unearth the relationships between various modes of action on different levels of the education system. Thus, global critique (or praise) of new strategies of governance which have been devised and implemented by education policy in various European countries during the last decade is considered too simple and offering too few leads for prospective development. The power of governance analysis therefore only unfolds when empirical macro-, meso- and micro-analyses are linked to give evidence to the way and the functionality of the integration of different contributions on various levels to the overall regime of coordination of action which produces visible effects.

Many European countries have launched attempts to transform the governance of their school systems into the direction of “evaluation-based” (or “evidence-based”) models. One important element within these changes has been the introduction of new forms of “team-based school inspection” (Kotthoff & Böttcher 2010). The symposium examines the logics and the implementation of new school inspection systems in Germany, Austria and England. All papers are based on qualitative data and focus neuralgic points of transforming system governance through school inspection: The ambivalent way administrators diffuse programmes of school inspection (first paper), the tensions between central regulation and local practice in the way inspectors arrive at their judgements about the quality of a school (second paper), and the frictions between the logics of action established by prior waves of schools innovation (concentrating on concepts of “individual school autonomy” and “leadership and school-based management”) and the partially new logics of school inspection (third paper). All papers will pay attention to possible tensions between “talk and action” (Brunsson 1989), between policy and practice of governance reform through school inspection and they will elaborate the logics of action and coordination of new inspection systems (see Ehren, Leuuw & Scheerens 2005).

References

Altrichter, H. (2010): Theory and Evidence on Governance: conceptual and empirical strategies of research on governance in education. In: European Educational Research Journal 9, 2, pp. 147-158.

Brunsson, N. (1989): The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations. Chichester.

Ehren, M.C.M., Leuuw F.L. & Scheerens, J. (2005): On the Impact of the Dutch Educational Supervisison Act. Analyzing Assumptions Concerning the Inspection of Primary Education. American Journal of Evaluation 26, 1, pp. 60-76.

Kotthoff, H.-G. & Böttcher, W. (2010): Neue Formen der „Schulinspektion“: Wirkungshoffnungen und Wirksamkeit im Spiegel empirischer Bildungsforschung. In H. Altrichter & K. Maag Merki (eds.): Handbuch Neue Steuerung im Schulsystem (pp. 295-325). Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.