Accountability as a policy technology: accounting for education performance in Europe

Abstract

This article discusses the investigation of accountability in different national contexts in the rapidly developing and increasingly important policy field of education in Europe. It draws on recent and current research to argue for a focus on what changing practices of accountability in education tell us about changes in governing education (and by extension, other public policy areas) within and across shifting policy spaces. The article further argues that accountability in education is increasingly defined as technical accountability through international and national comparative measures of performance, so that political accountability has been displaced, and performativity contributes to growing problems of diminished trust across and within education systems.

Points for practitioners

This article seeks to place the development of comparative measures of performance – in education and in other public sector provision – in a critical frame that draws attention to the reduction in political accountability that accompanies the explosion of performance measurement. The article underlines the extent to which competitive measurement of performance both drives out other, more complex forms of assessment of performance and creates relations of mistrust between education professionals and governments. Professionals working in the education sector are encouraged to scrutinize the operation of technologies like PISA and to be informed about their political effects and assumptions