Navigating the Evaluation Web: Evaluation in Swedish Local School Governance

Abstract

This paper explores the use, functions and constitutive effects of evaluation systems in local school governance, and identifies how contextual factors affect various uses of evaluation in this context. This case study of three Swedish municipalities demonstrates that local evaluation systems are set up to effectively sustain local school governance and ensure compliance with the Education Act and other state demands. Local decision makers have learned to navigate the web of evaluations and developed response strategies to manage external evaluations and to take into account what can be useful and what cannot be overlooked in order to avoid sanctions. The study shows that in contexts with high issue polarisation, such as schooling, the use of evaluation differs between the political majority and opposition, and relates to how schools perform in national comparisons and school inspections. Responses to external evaluations follow the same pattern. Some key performance indicators from the National Agency of Education and the School Inspectorate affect local school governance in that they define what is important in education, and reinforce the norm that benchmarking is natural and worthwhile, indicating constitutive effects of national evaluation systems.

• evaluation systems
• local school governance
• context
• navigation
• use
• constitutive effects

Notes

1 Evaluation system refers to “the procedural, institutional and policy arrangements shaping the evaluation function and its relationship to its internal and external environment” (Liverani and Lundgren 2007, 241). Evaluation system also refers to routines established for dealing with stand-alone evaluations and to a system producing streams of evaluation information.

2 Local school governance refers to governance that occurs in a municipality and in a quasi-market where local school actors govern and influence schooling and education. It includes the efforts of actors and institutions to govern and influence matters such as school policy, education, school climate and school safety.

3 SIRIS stands for Skolverkets Internetbaserade Resultat- och kvalitets Informations System (the NAE's Internet-based results and quality information system) while SALSA stands for Skolverkets Arbetsverktyg för Lokala SambandsAnalyser (the NAE's tool for local correlation analysis).

4 SALAR stands for the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions.

5 Performance measures from a national test (National Assessment Programme – Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN) are used as a performance measure for state education systems (Sellar and Lingard 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anders Hanberger

Anders Hanberger is Professor in Evaluation and director of research at the Umea Centre for Evaluation Research, Umea University. His research areas cover policy analysis and evaluation research and focus on public policy, governance, evaluation, evaluation systems and methodology. He has a special interest in the role of evaluation in democratic governance.

Lena Lindgren

Lena Lindgren is Associate Professor at the School of Public Administration, Gothenburg University. She works with teaching and research, focusing on evaluation and policy analysis, and has also conducted several evaluations on commission for government agencies, particularly in the field of education.

Ulf Lundström

Ulf Lundström is Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Educational Science, Umeå University. His main research interests lie within the areas of education policy, e.g. focusing on marketisation and inclusion, evaluation and the teaching profession.