During recent years many education systems have attempted to modernize their governance by establishing some variety of an “evidence-based governance regime”. They are meant to regulate the operation of the system and its continuous improvement by virtue of following features (see Altrichter and Maag Merki 2010):

(i) They set expectations for the performance of the education system and communicate them more clearly than before.

(ii) Evaluation and accountability are considered to be key issues in ensuring quality provision for all. Evaluation measures are to produce evidence as to whether or not expectations have been met by the practical operation of the system units.

(iii) “Evidence” will stimulate and orientate system development. Actors on all levels of the system – education politicians, administrators, schools leader, teachers, students etc. – will use evaluation information to make more rational choices in developing their contribution to the education system and to improving their performance.

In Europe, “evidence-based governance systems” are built on two dominant arrangements which often exist side by side. The first one includes school inspections (see Ehren et al. 2013). Inspectorates of Education set expectations by virtue of their inspection standards and procedures. They assess the quality of education by using existing data (e.g. statistics, data on student performance) and by collecting additional information (e.g. by interviews with stakeholders, classroom observation). As a consequence they produce reports which hold schools accountable for a broad range of goals related to student achievement, teaching, organization and leadership.

The other arrangement for educational accountability is built on performance standards (which set expectations) and tests of student performance (which produce evidence of system performance; Maag Merki 2010; Morris 2011). Student achievement results on national standardized tests are fed back to all levels of the education system in order to promote improvement (Visscher & Coe 2003; Ingram, Louis & Schroeder 2004; Coburn & Turner 2011).

In Austria, a policy of performance standards has been introduced since 2008. In 2012 national standard testing for secondary students has been administered for the first time and performance results have been fed back to schools (i.e. to students, teachers, parents, and administrators; see Altrichter & Kanape-Willingshofer 2012). Therefore the focused research questions of the proposed paper are: In what way (if at all) are performance standards and performance feedback taken up by schools and used as stimuli and orientation for classroom and school development?

The theoretical perspective is made up by the idea of “re-contextualization” in multi-level governance systems (as formulated by Fend (2006, pp. 174ff) and the policy enactment approach by Ball et al. (2012)). They call for a closer analysis and interpretation of the processes by which policy innovations are communicated and “re-contextualized” at the various levels of a multi-level system and by which schools and teachers take up policy innovations and translate it into action and structures on school and classroom level.

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