Session Information
23 SES 05 A, Managerial Accountability and its Effects on School Education
Paper Session
Contribution
Although researchers have focused on the complexity of leadership in policy implementation (Leithwood et al., 2004), they have paid less attention to understanding and documenting the ways in which schools and school leaders actually enact policy in practice. Some researchers (e.g., Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012; Hall, 2013; Hardy, 2014) have, however, contributed to our understanding of how principals have to manage tensions of multiple accountability systems in their work (Pollock & Winton, 2015). To some extent, the pressure seems to undermine teacher professionalism (e.g., Hall, 2013), but teachers have also used demands for increased test scores to inform learning and to improve practice, making this a site for teachers’ active engagement (e.g., Hardy, 2014).
This paper will add to this relevant research by reporting on a study conducted in a Norwegian context, which is not characterized by high-stakes testing. Even so, policy-makers push for increased test scores and argue that large-scale test data are useful for guiding school improvement (Møller & Skedsmo, 2013). A former study in Norway has suggested that developments in Norwegian policies demonstrate the difficulties of navigating the tensions between two key aspects of accountability (i.e., answerability for the achievement of short-term goals and responsibility for the fulfillment of broader purposes) and the challenges of building capacity for both (Hatch, 2013). Still, we know less about the enactment of policy in practice. The aim of the present study is to explore and analyze what aspects of interpretation exist in policy translation at the school level.The following research questions guide the study: (a) How do school leaders make sense of and respond to external demands related to a new policy context which emphasizes results based on national tests in reading and numeracy? and (b) How do they use national test results in their local work with school and student development?
One might assume that new expectations of increasing test scores and external accountability create both challenges and possibilities for school leaders, but exactly how these affect the work of school leaders across contexts is an unsettled question that depends on national and local organizational work contexts. There are both competing notions of and different approaches to accountability (cf. Pollock & Winton, 2015; Ranson, 2003). In this article, we apply the distinction between external and internal accountability (Abelman, Elmore, Even, Kenyon, & Marshall, 1999; Elmore, 2005) as one of our analytical tools.
Growing empirical evidence has shown that external accountability exerts influence on teaching and learning; in particular, researchers have highlighted the importance of school leadership’s role in how organizations respond to changes in the environment (Coburn, 2004; Diamond & Spillane, 2004; Spillane & Burch, 2006). As a result, recent studies have questioned the earlier accounts of weak ties between policy and classroom work (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Weick, 1976). Coburn (2004) has identified five coupling mechanisms, namely: rejection, decoupling (symbolic responses with no effect), parallel structures (to balance different priorities), assimilation (make a fit with pre-existing understanding), and accommodation (substantial changes in the pre-existing understanding). In this article, we use these five coupling mechanisms as analytical tools in combination with the distinction between external and internal accountability. The analysis is also inspired by Ball’s and colleagues’ theorizing of policy enactments (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012) in which enactment is seen as part of a process of interpretation that would be framed by institutional factors involving a range of actors.Policy enactment includes the interpretation and translation of policies transferred into practice, which can be defined as ways of making sense of policy initiatives.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Abelman, C., Elmore, R., Even, J., Kenyon, S., & Marshall, J. (1999). When accountability knocks, will anyone answer? Philadelphia: CPRE Publications. Anderson, S., Leithwood, K., & Strauss, T. (2010). Leading data use in schools: Organizational conditions and practices at the school and district levels. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 9(3), 292–327. Ball, S. J. (2013). The education debate. Bristol: Policy Press. Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. New York: Routledge. Coburn, C. E. (2003). Rethinking scale: Moving beyond numbers to deep and lasting change. Educational Researcher, 32(6), 3–12. Coburn, C. E. (2004). Beyond decoupling: Rethinking the relationship between the institutional environment and the classroom. Sociology of Education, 77(3), 211–244. Elmore, R. F., (2005) Accountable Leadership, The Educational Forum, 69(2), 134-142. Leithwood, K., Jantzi, D., Earl, L., Watson, N., Levin, B., & Fullan, M. (2004). Strategic leadership for large‐scale reform: The case of England’s national literacy and numeracy strategy. School Leadership & Management, 24(1), 57–79. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83 (2), 340–363. Møller, J. (2009). School leadership in an age of accountability: Tensions between managerial and professional accountability. Journal of Educational Change, 10(2), 37–46. Møller, J., & Skedsmo, G. (2013). Norway: Centralisation and decentralisation as twin reform strategies. In L. Moos (Ed.), Transnational influences on values and practices in Nordic educational leadership (pp. 61–72). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. (Eds.), Reformtakter-om fornyelse og stabilitet i grunnopplæringen [Reforming and Reforming. Continuity and Change in Primary and Secondary Schools]. (pp. 119–132). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Robinson, V. (2011). Student-centered leadership. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Spillane, J. P. (1999). External reform initiatives and teachers’ efforts to reconstruct their practice: The mediating role of teachers’ zones of enactment. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(2), 143–175. Spillane, J. P., & Burch, P. (2006). The institutional environment and instructional practice: Changing patterns of guidance and control in public education. In H.-D. Meyer & B. Rowan (Eds.), The new institutionalism in education (pp. 87–101). Albany: State University of New York Press. Weick, K. E. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 1–19.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.