Periodic Reporting for period 4 - REFORMED (Reforming Schools Globally: A Multi-Scalar Analysis of Autonomy and Accountability Policies in the Education Sector)
Période du rapport: 2021-01-01 au 2022-06-30
Against this background, the REFORMED project scrutinises how and why SAWA policies are being adopted and re-formulated by policy actors operating at multiple scales, and examines the institutional frameworks and enactment processes behind SAWA’s differential effects in different school contexts. Specifically, the main project objectives are to:
O1. Analyse the international spread of SAWA reforms.
O2. Understand how institutional and political factors intervene in the selection and retention of SAWA policies in different countries.
O3. Analyse how teachers and principals engage with SAWA policies, from a comparative perspective.
O4. Analyse the impact of SAWA policies in educational and organisational practices in different school contexts.
O5. Explore how the institutional design of SAWA has the potential to activate/inhibit a series of side effects.
In the context of RS2, which focuses on SAWA effects in schools (O3-O5), we have designed a novel survey instrument to measure how teachers and school principals perceive, interpret and respond to the SAWA mandate. The survey includes so-called survey experiments, which allow to capture under what conditions side effects emerge in SAWA environments, and overcome endogeneity and social desirability biases in data gathering. Survey findings have been complemented with interviews with school actors in a representative sample of schools. Our findings show that schools respond to SAWA regulations differently, and that the presence of undesired effects, decoupling and dilution strategies is more persistent in schools serving socially disadvantaged populations.If not implemented with sufficient support, SAWA policies trigger differentiated practices that contribute to reinforce school segmentation—creating very disparate and context-sensitive educational experiences and practices, and ultimately exacerbating the social stigmatisation of disadvantaged schools.
The two described strands are intimately interconnected. Reformed findings emphasise the interconnectedness between institutions, politics and policy in school governance reforms. We show that the 'epistemic fit' between new data-intensive policy instruments, on the one hand, and previous institutions on the other, is key to understanding how school actors receive and enact new policy mandates. Overall, country- and school-specific processes of policy negotiation and contestation result in idiosyncratic practices and outcomes.
Our research findings invite policy-makers to rethink accountability policy, and to give greater consideration to the locus and space of accountability. New forms of network and incumbent accountability, grounded in local education spaces that transcend individual schools, could contribute to generate organisational improvement, quality assurance and policy learning dynamics among schools, without necessarily generating competition and segmentation within educational systems.
Finally, the REFORMED Survey delivers large-scale datasets that can be used by scholars to explore and analyse the enactment of school autonomy and accountability policies in different contexts, by taking into account context-, school- and individual-level relevant variables that have been overlooked in previous research. The conception and development of the REFORMED questionnaires, as well as the sampling strategy, have involved a number of steps aiming at comparability across cases and at obtaining data of a very high standard.