In a context of globalization and new forms of regulation and governance, public action in education is increasingly based on knowledge based regulation tools (Pons & Van Zanten, 2007). Particularly, accountability policies are developing around the world, based on a combination of several tools as such as testing, standards, in order to assess the results of education systems meanwhile « contracts », « report card », guidance or monitoring tools are regulating the consequences and sanctions that could follow for schools and education professionals.
The question of the real effects and impacts of accountability policies are under scrutiny in many european or north american national contexts, but so far research results are confusing. There are no real scientific consensus about the main intended or unintended effects of these policies either on the results of education systems (in terms of equity or efficacity) or on the schools and their professionals (Mons, 2009 ; Carnoy & Loebb, 2002 ; Lee, 2008, 2011 ; Mons & Dupriez, 2011 ; Harris & Herrington, 2006). A part of the various or contradictory results of the research could be related to methodological issues (Lee, 2008) ; at the same time, some authors have emphasized that there were various kind of accountabilities policies accross national contexts (ie low and high stake policies) (for ex. Mons, 2009 ; Hanushek & Raymond, 2004).
However, beyond « soft » and « hard » accountability policies, it is often supposed, that external testing are approximatly based on the same policy tools in various national context and that technical features of policy tools do not matter much. Meanwhile, this could be a reducing gaze on these policies, which is unable to thematize and think the policy tools which are put in place to implement the policy. The precise features of the knowledge based regulation tools (Pons & Van Zanten, 2007) put in place in each national context could matter for the process and the resulting outputs of these policies. Based on the sociology of public action tools (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2004 ; Pons, 2010 ; Buisson-Fenet & Le Naour, 2008), our intention in this paper is to present an exploratory work, aiming to build a typology of accountability policy tools.

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