Session Information
23 SES 08 A, Policies and Practices of Performativity and Students’ Responses
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper engages with the ongoing education policy debate on fairness, student rights and educational governance related to increased accountability pressure derived from neo-liberal policies and associated state restructurings (eg. Waldow, 2014; Lingard and Sellar, 2013; Ozga et al, 2011). At the centre of the paper is the Swedish Schools Inspectorate’s re-markings of already marked student achievements on national tests – a supervisory programme introduced by the Swedish Government on a three years mandate in 2009 and subsequently assigned on a permanent basis. This programme is situated as an example of political management of the tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes.
Associated with accountability and improvement regimes, standardised national testing policies have a long history in many nations (Mons 2009), whereas in others they reflect a more recent change in the steering of education systems (Eurydice 2009; Lingard and Sellar 2013). In highly decentralised, marketised and competitive education systems it has been stressed that national tests are important tools for follow-up and evaluation of the performance of education (Blanchenay et al. 2014; Segerholm 2009) as well as to gauge the overall effectiveness of education policies and practices (Eurydice 2009).
Up until 2009, Sweden was one of the few countries in Europe where teachers assessed their students’ achievements on national tests independently, with no external checks of the assessments taking place (Eurydice 2009). The lack of external reviewers put strong emphasis on the teachers’ ability to make reliable assessments and fair judgments (Wikström and Wikström 2004). However, these assessments, and consequently, the merit and worth of national tests as monitoring instruments on a system level, have been questioned due to reports on ‘grade inflation’ and differences in marks on national test results and the final grades for those subjects. Parallel to this development, international assessments and evaluations have indicated declining learning outcomes among Swedish students and an increasing disparity among Swedish schools. Education has been portrayed by the media as being in emergency and crisis. Media discourses are part of ‘policy as becoming’ (Ball et al. 2012) when constructing issues and subjects in specific ways, and this media logic has notably become a necessary aspect of governing (Gewirtz et al. 2004; Lingard and Rawolle 2004).
Previous scholarship has provided important insights into the different conceptions of justice built into the blueprints of various systems of examination and assessment in Europe, with a claim that national tests in Sweden serve as ‘safeguards of fair procedure’ (Waldow 2014), and with critique to the methodology of the Inspectorate’s re-marking of national tests (Gustafsson and Erickson 2013). Less attention, however, has been directed to contested claims for authority over teacher assessment, and especially to the processes by which state level authorities have consolidated and extended their control over teachers’ assessment of national tests. Consequently, the ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 1983) and contexts (Stake 1995) necessary in order to understand the complex nature of political forces, interactions, and processes involved, are lacking.
A conceptual framework informed by work of Bacchi (2009) guides the analysis of the ways and means by which an external agency has been able to expropriate control of teachers’ assessments of national tests from the internal control of the schools. Unfolding texts are examined with regard to key questions, in this case: How are teachers’ assessments of national tests represented as a problem, and what different assumptions underpin these representations? Further, how do the ways policy actors discuss and address these issues shape the problem descriptions? We further draw on Rawolle’s (2010) concept of mediatisation, focusing on the implications of representations in different social fields in the becoming of policy.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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