ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates the ways in which local authorities utilise quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) to govern schools. It also studies how schools react to QAE policies as political actors, that is, how they use them to obtain resources and power. The analysis draws on a combination of governance theories and on an understanding of the political frame of organisational analysis. Data were collected in selected localities in Brazil, China, and Russia through document analysis, interviews, and observations.
We demonstrate that QAE instruments are reinterpreted locally in accordance with pre-existing practices of quality control and school governance and are biased towards local actors’ political interests. High-performing schools can thus utilise QAE policies to draw political power from sources such as expertise, access to agenda setting, and the construction of networks and coalitions, while low performers are increasingly disadvantaged. Schools’ reputations act as a key to virtuous or vicious cycles in which schools find themselves ensnared in the implementation of performance evaluation. Room for action for those schools which oppose new QAE policies is quite scarce. However, schools can practise hidden resistance and to some extent avoid the penetration of QAE tools in schools’ internal processes.
