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Coping with performance expectations: towards a deeper understanding of variation in school principals’ responses to accountability demands

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Abstract

In recent decades, performance-based accountability (PBA) has become an increasingly popular policy instrument to ensure educational actors are responsive to and assume responsibility for achieving centrally defined learning goals. Nonetheless, studies report mixed results with regard to the impact of PBA on schools’ internal affairs and instructional practices. With the aim of contributing to the understanding of the social mechanisms and processes that induce particular school responses, this paper reports on a study that examines how Norwegian principals perceive, interpret, and translate accountability demands. The analysis is guided by the policy enactment perspective and the sociological concept of “reactivity”, and relies on 23 in-depth interviews with primary school principals in nine urban municipalities in Norway. The findings highlight three distinct response patterns in how principals perceive, interpret, and translate PBA demands: alignment, balancing multiple purposes, and symbolic responses. The study simultaneously shows how different manifestations of two social mechanisms form important explanatory factors to understand principals’ varying responses, while it is highlighted how the mechanisms are more likely to operate under particular conditions, which relate both to principals’ trajectories and views on education, and to school-specific characteristics and the local accountability regime. The study contributes to the accountability literature by showing how, even in the relative absence of material consequences and low levels of marketization, standardized testing and PBA can drive behavioral change, by reframing norms of good educational practice and by affecting how educators make sense of core aspects of their work.

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Notes

  1. The authors classified the three schools as “atypical”, as they were theoretically selected for their “a priori distance towards the worldviews embedded into the accountability instruments” (Barbana et al. 2019, p.11).

  2. While Espeland and Sauder (2007) present self-fulfilling prophecies and commensuration as two distinctive mechanisms of reactivity, they simultaneously emphasize how the two mechanisms can interact in the production of behavioral change.

  3. The data are based on “Survey on Municipal Organization 2016, Municipality File”. The survey was financed by the Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation (KMD). The data are provided by Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR) and prepared and made available by NSD—Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Neither NIBR, KMD, nor NSD are responsible for the analyses/interpretation of the data presented here.

  4. The main rationale behind preparing students for the test is to make sure students are familiar with the test format and test situation. Such preparations are recommended by the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, and are perceived particularly important for primary schools, where students have little to no experience with taking tests.

  5. To assure the anonymity of the research participants, each interviewee is referred to by a numerical code. The letter “P” stands for principal, while the number in the coding refers to the school ID (see Table 1). All interview quotes have been translated from Norwegian to English by the author(s).

  6. Principals acknowledge that, if misused, the publication of results can have negative side-effects. Nonetheless, not publishing test results is still perceived as more problematic.

  7. This response pattern was found to be the most commonly applied pattern. Principals who more explicitly adopt this approach include P4; P6; P7; P8; P9; P10; P13; P17; P18; P19; P20; P21; and P23.

  8. Principals are in particular positive about recent changes to the test format, which allow for comparisons over time.

  9. The interview data reveal large differences in the extent to which parents are perceived as putting pressure on schools and educators to obtain high test scores. Many principals argue that parents are generally more concerned with whether their child has a good time at school, than with academic results. If they do express an interest in the latter, this tends to reflect a desire to find out how their own child performs, not necessarily the school as a whole. Nonetheless, at some schools, principals argue that parents show increasing interest in school performance, and raise their voice in case of below-expected performance. In extreme cases, test scores are used when “shopping” for schools (P7), even though opportunities to do so remain limited. That is, even in municipalities that employ freer regulations around school choice, priority remains given to students residing in the school’s catchment area.

  10. Principals express concerns about the validity of the national tests on multiple grounds. For example, one principal explains that it is not realistic to demand from 5th-graders to sit still for 90 min to conduct a test. As students struggle to do so, the tests are perceived to measure ‘who has best prepared their students to sit as quietly as possible’ (P5), rather than what students have learned or can do. Other principals argue the tests predominantly reflect students’ backgrounds, rather than the quality of the school’s teaching practices.

  11. Name of the curriculum reform introduced in 2006, which transformed how Norwegian schools were governed.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all principals involved in the study for kindly giving their time to participate in an interview. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Clara Fontdevila, Antonina Levatino, Guri Skedsmo and Antoni Verger, as well as two anonymous reviewers. The paper has benefited greatly from their careful readings of earlier drafts.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council under Grant 680172.

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Correspondence to Marjolein K. Camphuijsen.

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Camphuijsen, M.K. Coping with performance expectations: towards a deeper understanding of variation in school principals’ responses to accountability demands. Educ Asse Eval Acc 33, 427–453 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-020-09344-6

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