ABSTRACT
The chapter will take the examples of the German-speaking school systems of Germany and Austria to analyse recent changes in the governance of schooling and their impact on students, teachers and schools. Over the last 20 years, many European countries have attempted to modernise the governance of their education systems. In Austria – and very similarly, in the education systems of the German Bundesländer – this process started in the early 1990s with school autonomy policies which were to give more room for manoeuvre to individual schools to develop specific school profiles according to the needs and potentials of their environment. In a second wave of reform, the capacities and rights of the management of individual schools were strengthened and instruments for internal management (e.g. quality management, school programmes) were introduced. The PISA shock in 2001 and the political and media debate in its wake provided the essential impulse for a new phase, where governments had to show leadership and initiate changes. The chapter gives an overview of the research analysing the effects of governance changes. In its main part it will discuss the question How are schools, teachers and administrators coping with evidence-based reforms? This draws on a qualitative project which used three-year longitudinal case studies from Austrian primary and secondary schools to analyse how teachers and schools cope with performance standards, how they change their teaching (if at all) in the face of performance tests, and how they make sense of the data feedback which they receive about their classes’ performance.
