Abstract
Numerous studies have examined performance-based accountability policies’ institutional formulation or public action instruments, discursive orientations, or effects, particularly in contexts of high-stakes or “strict” accountability. Our comparison of French and Quebec policies extends the field of studies to “soft” accountability policies and is innovative in the manner of understanding them, with a focus on both their trajectories over time and their mediations and instrumentations at the intermediate and local levels. The analysis of trajectories underscores both these policies’ dependence on the historical and political context of school systems and the translation of transnational models and discourse. With respect to research on these policies’ main institutional discourse and content, the study of mediations at work leads to a more complex and contextualized intelligibility of these policies, depending on the intermediate entities studied, but also brings out some factors and conditions of mediation logics at play. Furthermore, the analysis of the local instrumentation of these policies leads to contextualizing their real effects on the functioning of schools and the education system.
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Notes
- 1.
Let us specify that this discourse is qualified as neoliberal in the broadest sense of this term, going beyond the return to economic dogmas or theories promoting privatization, the market and private financing of educational, social or cultural services, to the detriment of the state maintaining this responsibility. In this analysis, “neoliberal” refers to any form of policy thematizing public action and the problems to be resolved in terms of (neoclassical) economic analysis, with this public action tending, as a consequence, to transform the actors and their environment in a performative fashion, to then bring them closer in practice to terms by which economic analysis understands them–that is, as a collection of individuals driven by their own interests and strategies, more or less limited or regulated by various institutional or social mechanisms (Bourdieu, 1998; Dardot & Laval, 2010).
- 2.
More precisely, the performative function of neoliberal discourse would be to semantically transform and operationalize the functioning and regulation of school systems by relying on an analysis inspired more or less by an economic paradigm (neoclassical). Thus, schools would become a system of production and consumption of educational goods, subject to varying degrees of centralizing regulation by the state or decentralized by the market. Inspired by economic theory and New Public Management, neoliberal policies would lead to a transformation of the nature of education by school professionals but also of the meaning of the school experience for its users (Apple, 2004; Ball, 1998, 2003, 2012; Robertson, 2005). Thus, the performative effects of neoliberal discourse would favor the emergence of a newly defined educational subject, following M. Foucault’s research, an individual “entrepreneur” (Olssen & Peters, 2005). For the youth or users of the system, it is a matter of becoming an “entrepreneur of oneself” through the virtues of the “project” and an educational path appropriate for his or her own capacities and aspirations. For administrators and school principals, it is a case of becoming “managers,” and “leaders,” directing autonomous schools and answerable for their performance. For teachers, this involves becoming “professionals,” capable of contributing to these school performances, due to their skills and commitment (Ball, 2003, 2009; Gewirtz, 2002; Ranson, 2003).
- 3.
We do not discuss effects for the beneficiaries foreseen by the policy—the improvement in the rate of graduation in the entire Quebec population and the reduction in the drop-out rate among certain disadvantaged groups—boys, those from disadvantaged neighborhoods, etc. Such an evaluation of these policies, in fact, deserves a study of its own, which goes far beyond the subject of our research and, indeed, would prove challenging, especially in Quebec, since it would be difficult to meticulously isolate the effect of the policy itself, in controlling for all the other factors which could play a role in either school success or the strength of school democracy (official objectives of the policy).
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Maroy, C., Pons, X. (2019). Conclusion. In: Maroy, C., Pons, X. (eds) Accountability Policies in Education. Educational Governance Research, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01285-4_8
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