“What Gets Measured Gets Done”

Abstract

English secondary schools operate within a performance management system, which includes league tables reporting school performance across a number of indicators. This article reports the results of an interview-based study, showing that head teachers care about their school's place in the league tables, and that they believe this system affects behaviour. The effects they identify include some unintended consequences, not necessarily related to improved overall school performance, including focusing on borderline students who can boost a pivotal indicator: the number of students gaining five A*-Cs at GCSE. This behaviour reflects, in part, the dual role played by headteachers: they are both educationalists (serving the interests of all pupils); and school marketers, concerned with promoting the school to existing and prospective parents. The behaviour is also consistent with economic theory, which predicts a focus on that which is measured, potentially at the expense of that which is important, in sectors characterised by incomplete measurement, by multiple stakeholders and containing workers with diverse objectives. We conclude that, given that performance indicators do affect behaviour, it is important to minimise unintended consequences, and we suggest how the use of value-added indicators of student performance may improve both what gets measured and what gets done in secondary schools.

Funding, reputation and targets: the discursive logics of high-stakes testing

“…A relentless focus on schooling outcomes within the 'A-C economy' of GCSE results has been shown to induce practices of 'educational triage' (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000), leading to the selective and differential allocation of teaching resources to maximise the 'return on investment' as depicted by favourable representations of student performance. Put bluntly, 'what gets measured'namely A*-C GCSE attainment rates -'gets done' (Wilson, Croxson, & Atkinson, 2006).…”

Productivity in Public Services

“…Bandiera et al (2007) demonstrate in the context of their study that private sector managers might focus their efforts on more rather than less productive workers in order to raise average productivity among their team. In a public sector context there is some evidence provided by Wilson et al (2006) that, faced with a performance indicator of the number of pupils gaining five GCSEs at grades A * -C, teachers focused their efforts on borderline C/D pupils. Hanushek and Raymond (2004) find evidence that a US school accountability measure increased scores of all pupils, and while it tended to narrow the Hispanic-White test score gap, it tended to widen the Black-White test score gap.…”

Servile Power: When Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

“…In the last 10-15 years educational researchers have witnessed and described a proliferation of political discourses of evaluation, assessment, standardization and accountability (Ball, 1990(Ball, , 2003Jeffrey & Woods, 1998;Clatter, 2002;Weiner, 2002;McGhee & Nelson, 2005;Wilson et al, 2006;Web et al, 2006). In educational research as well as in broader public sector research this development has been studied as a part of the emergence of New Public Management and neoliberal forms of governing (see Riley et al, 1995;Clarke & Newman, 1997, pp.…”