Customers, partners and rights-holders: School evaluations on websites

Abstract

This paper explores how evaluation, which has expanded at all levels of school governance across Europe, shapes parental roles by studying how local school governors and schools in Sweden represent evaluation to parents on their websites. Websites are prime locations for public communications and are useful for exploring the functions of evaluations intended for parental use. In recent decades, parental influence over school has increased through ‘choice and voice’ options, while the role of evaluations has continued to expand in school governance. Evaluations construct social roles, identities and relations and, as such, are constitutive of the social world and our place in it. By drawing on Dahler-Larsen's concept of “constitutive effects”, the discursive implications of evaluation are discussed. The dominant type of evaluation represented on websites is performance data used for accountability and informed school choice purposes. Parents are primarily positioned as customers who exert influence through choice and exit options, reinforcing the almost unquestioned norm of parental right to educational authority. Representations of evaluation differ depending on local political majority, school performance, and public versus independent provider; as such, they are not hegemonic but tend to strengthen the position of parents as individual rights-holders, marginalising forms of collective action.

• evaluation
• local school governance
• parents
• school choice
• user influence

Notes

1 It is necessary to recognise that parental influence can be exerted without regular participation in governing schools and that formal participation does not necessarily result in an influence. Henceforth, I will use the term “influence” when referring to the ways parents can potentially affect education without judging whether they have successfully exerted this influence.

2 This article is part of the research project Consequences of evaluation for school practice: steering, accountability, and school development funded by the Swedish Research Council.

3 These platforms are usually said to convey information about what is happening at school and to present agendas and minutes from parent meetings and parent boards, individual assessments of students, grades, scores, class attendance records and contacts.

4 SIRIS is the NAE's statistical database on school quality and performance (http://siris.skolverket.se/siris/f?p=Siris:1:0); for further discussion of SIRIS, see Lindgren, Lundström and Hanberger (2016).

5 For a discussion of the characteristics and assumed functions of SALAR's open comparisons (http://skl.se/tjanster/merfranskl/oppnajamforelser/grundskola.761.html), see Lindgren, Lundström and Hanberger (2016).

6 SALSA is the NAE's statistical model of local analysis (http://salsa.artisan.se/). It provides value-added statistics on school performance accounting for factors such as parental educational level, proportion of boys and girls, proportion of students with one or both parents not born in Sweden, and proportion of students not born in Sweden. In 2013, the “foreign background” indicator was changed to the proportion of students newly arrived in Sweden, where ‘newly’ is defined as within the last four years (NAE, 2015b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Carlbaum

Sara Carlbaum is a Doctor in Political Science and a researcher at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research centres on education policy and governance, with a focus on evaluation, school inspection and marketisation. Particular interests are citizenship constructions, social justice, gender, rights and equity. Email: [email protected]