Datafication in schools: enactments of quality assurance and evaluation policies in Brazil

Candido, Helena Hinke Dobrochinski

doi:10.1080/09620214.2019.1656101

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 44 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Whereas some educators seem to adapt their practices to meet accountability expectations, others respond by ignoring, avoiding, resisting, or re-writing policy demands, or by relying on quick and visible solutions, rather than on thorough and long-term changes (e.g. Barbana et al 2019;Candido 2020;Diamond and Spillane 2004;Falabella 2014;Maroy and Pons 2019;Verger et al 2020). In line with recent scholarship on policy enactment (Ball et al 2012), these studies demonstrate how, rather than a linear and top-down process, putting policy into practice forms a creative, complex, and sometimes constrained social process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Camphuijsen

2020

Educ Asse Eval Acc

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Camphuijsen

2020

Educ Asse Eval Acc

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Schools have individual histories, buildings and infrastructures, staffing profiles, leadership experiences, budgetary situations and teaching and learning challenges (Ball et al, 2012;Braun et al, 2011;Maguire et al, 2010) which will affect how they respond to policy. For example, new research on the enactment of quality assurance and evaluation policies in Brazil indicates that school actors do not share a homogeneous understanding of these policies and that their enactments can be influenced by their schools' socio-historic contexts (Candido, 2020). There is a need for research in Ireland to begin exploring the similarities and differences in terms of how SSE and its features such as student voice and parent voice are enacted and experienced in voluntary secondary schools, ETB schools, and community/comprehensive schools, including in both disadvantaged and more privileged settings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enacting school self-evaluation: the policy actors in Irish schools

Skerritt

O’Hara

Brown

et al. 2021

International Studies in Sociology of Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

School self-evaluation is a low-stakes policy recently mandated in Ireland and while schools are becoming more consistent in engaging in this internal mode of evaluation, their engagement has not been uniform. This paper provides new ways of thinking about, understanding, and explaining how school self-evaluation plays out in Irish schools. Subscribing to the view that policies are not simply implemented but enacted through the creative processes of interpretation and translation, this paper shows how school self-evaluation is performed in Irish schools in various ways by various people. We identify numerous policy actors in our qualitative data: narrators, entrepreneurs, outsiders, transactors, enthusiasts, translators, critics, and receivers. This assortment of actors helps to bring school self-evaluation to life but as it comprises heterogeneous entities with varying characteristics, levels of experience, and motivations it is simply not possible for this policy to be implemented in schools as policymakers envisage.

show abstract

“…PBA policies follow a principal-agent logic and are not only expected to trigger school improvement through incentives and sanctions, but by promoting the use of learning-achievement data among school actors. Nonetheless, despite the expectations of PBA policies being high, especially in the context of poverty, where most underperforming schools tend to be found (Mintrop 2004), international evidence on the enactment of PBA policies and datafication shows a wide range of school responses (Falabella 2014;Koretz 2017;Landri 2018;Maroy and Pons 2019) that ranges from policy appropriation to rejection (Candido 2019) or opting out (Landri 2018). Existing research suggests that while some schools react to PBA by adopting substantive changes to pedagogical approaches and practices, others tend to adopt cosmetic or instrumental behaviors to improve their performance in national assessments (Mintrop andTrujillo 2007a, 2007b;Mittleman and Jennings 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Latin American countries, there is also a growing corpus of investigations that explore the enactment of datafication and PBA in disadvantaged contexts. For example, in the case of Brazil, Candido (2019) found that datafication has penetrated "the imaginaries of school actors" and that school actors' engagement with PBA is higher and becomes more meaningful "when connected to problems individuals aim to solve" (p.14). Nevertheless, this investigation also illustrates the contentious nature of policy enactment and shows how school principals and teachers negotiate, decouple and even resist PBA policies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These include (a) situated contexts, which refers mainly to the local history of the school and to the socio-economic characteristics of the school population; (b) professional contexts, including the ethos, values , and beliefs of the management team and the teaching staff, together with the leadership style; (c) the material contexts, referring to economic resources, staffing, school facilities, and technological resources; and (d) external contexts related to expectations, support, and pressures that come from the account holder or from the policy context at the local or state level (Braun et al 2011b). As noted by Braun et al (2011b), Candido (2019), Carrasco and Fromm (2016), Keddie (2014), and Thrupp and Lupton (2006), contextual circumstances of a different nature are crucial in explaining differences in the way schools put new policy mandates into practice. School contexts can influence not only the degree of policy appropriation but can also trigger differences in terms of strategies, practices, and policy outcomes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

To align or not to align: the enactment of accountability and data-use in disadvantaged school contexts

Parcerisa

2020

Educ Asse Eval Acc

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the growing number of researches about performance-based accountability (PBA) in education, there is still scarce evidence on the mediating role of subjective variables (e.g., perceived pressure and alignment to PBA mandates) in the enactment of PBA in socially disadvantaged contexts. This is paradoxical because marginalized schools are usually those that are on probation and have to cope with the threat of sanctions more frequently. Existing investigations on PBA enactment have put increasing attention to the role of situated and material contexts, but there is still limited knowledge on how subjective variables can mediate policy enactment processes and enable the adoption of different school responses. To address these gaps, the article aims to explore how the perceived accountability pressure, the school performative culture, and meaning-making processes at the school level are mediating the enactment of PBA policies in disadvantaged schools. At the theoretical level, the study is informed by sense-making and policy enactment frameworks. Methodologically speaking, the investigation uses a comparative case study approach based on two extreme cases, which have been selected on the basis of a factorial analysis that combines both survey and secondary data. The extreme cases represent two different scenarios, which, despite operating in similar situated contexts, are characterized by having opposite levels of perceived pressure and alignment with the performative culture. The case studies combine survey data (n = 39) with documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with the management team and teachers (n = 7). The findings show that subjective variables, in interaction with other contextual factors, can exacerbate or inhibit PBA regulatory pressures and trigger diverging school responses.

show abstract

Datafication in schools: enactments of quality assurance and evaluation policies in Brazil

Cited by 8 publications

References 44 publications

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

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

Enacting school self-evaluation: the policy actors in Irish schools

To align or not to align: the enactment of accountability and data-use in disadvantaged school contexts

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About