This article aims to understand how new accountability instruments in the context of the French-speaking Belgian educational system are appropriated by schools. After having characterised the specific nature of those instruments in the context of a traditionally highly decentralised system involved in a significant process of centralisation, we identify their effects through the case study of three schools. Using a new institutionalist lens, the analyses show that these instruments refer, in the French-speaking Belgian context, to a specific demand from the political environment of schools: developing and framing a common educational landscape, rather than to a logic of teacher evaluation. The data also indicate a reaffirmation, against this specific political demand, of three traditional ways of functioning tied up to the requests made by local educational communities. Thus, the analyses show a conflict between inherited institutions highly embedded in local contexts and the political signal associated with the new accountability instruments aiming to institutionalise common norms at the system level.
This article presents the discussion and the conclusion of an EERJ Special Issue on accountability policy forms in four European educational systems aimed at identifying how global schemes and instruments of accountability are integrated into national governance patterns. The comparative discussion indicates that accountability instruments and schemes take the form of singular trajectories that are neither a continuation of the national histories nor an indexation on global governance models. It also emphasises the need to better conceptualise how power relations in the interface between the global and national scenes, as well as within national contexts, shape the accountability forms.
This article is an introduction to a European Educational Research Journal special issue on accountability policies and instruments in Europe. Two hypotheses grounded in the new institutionalist theory are presented to conceptualise and analyse the variety of national trajectories and forms of accountability in four European education systems (French-speaking Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal). The first hypothesis is that of path dependence, which privileges the prevalence of national histories despite the diffusion of global instruments. Strong resemblances between the countries, meanwhile, would favour the second hypothesis of a globalised field in which education systems are exposed to similar policy schemes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.