The ethics of competition: accountability policy enactment in Chilean schools’ everyday life

ABSTRACT

Public policies have a moral order, an ethical horizon. They offer a vocabulary of imagined micro-policies. Using the case of Chile, this paper examines the ways in which accountability policies are reworked within schools and how they affect actors’ subjectivities. It adds new findings to the existing body of research on school accountability policies, offering in-depth evidence based on the case of Chile, which has a high-stakes testing model and a widespread competitive voucher system. The research is based on case studies of ten public and private subsidised schools, framed by a sociological perspective of policy enactment theory. The research findings show the ways that accountability policies are recreated, expanded, and intensified at the local level, permeating an ethic of competition. The analysis focuses on three qualitative trends: school actors’ sense-making of test scores and labels; zones of safety and risk for teachers under an accountability regime; and the emergence of a sticky web of persuasion, surveillance, and coercion among school members in order to improve performance. The practices examined are not understood as ‘secondary effects’ or an ‘implementation problem’, as if they occur unconnected from the policy rationale. The outcomes are consistent with the policy itself in interaction with school life.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountability
• high-stakes testing
• school markets
• performativity
• policy enactment
• Chile

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Deborah Youdell for providing insightful comments on a former version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Called: School Performance Evaluation Test.

2. Stands for: System for Measuring the Quality of Education.

3. In Spanish language, Asistencia Técnica Educativa.

4. Lead by the parliamentary Carlos Montes.

5. In Spanish, Subvención Escolar Preferencial.

6. The author has developed some of these ideas in greater depth in Falabella (2016a).

7. At another level, interestingly, Steiner-Khamsi (2016) provides evidence of ways in which policymakers strategically offer very different explanations for successful countries with international tests (such as Japan, Finland, Germany) in order to justify and push internally certain policies within countries.

8. Various daily practices emerged from the case studies that reveal a performative culture; for more detail see Falabella and Opazo (2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Commission of Scientific Research and Technology (Conicyt), National Fund of Scientific Development and Technology (Fondecyt) [grant number 11140302].

Notes on contributors

Alejandra Falabella

Alejandra Falabella is an associate professor at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile. Her main areas of interest are in sociology of education and the relationship between education policy, school practices and social class. Falabella’s research draws on market and accountability policies, school privatisation, and social segregation. Recently she has studied history of school markets and national assessment policies in Chile. Falabella is associate editor of Education Policy Analysis Archives.