ABSTRACT

This chapter identifies and analyzes varying school responses to accountability pressures in Chilean education by paying particular attention to the role of subjective variables in policy enactment. Specifically, on the basis of a mixed-methods study, we analyze how school actors’ interpretations of and dispositions towards performance-based accountability (PBA), on the one hand, and their experienced levels of pressure, on the other, influence how they respond to the accountability regulatory system. As we will show, the responses to PBA that have been identified by crossing these two factors go beyond the conventional alignment–decoupling dichotomy and include a more varying range of options, such as fabrication, de facto opting out, accommodation, induced alignment and dilution. Our perspective is premised on the assumption that the way school actors respond to policy prerogatives is contingent on the way these actors make sense of PBA pressures and expectations within their broader social and institutional frameworks. In other words, the responses to PBA that we identify are the result of analyzing how school actors see and live accountability regulations in their reference contexts.