ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how processes of accountability and audit have become increasingly prominent in schools, with sometimes deleterious effects. These accountability processes are evident across the key message systems of curriculum, teaching and assessment. The chapter introduces how these accountability and audit processes have become an important part of the practice of ‘policy-borrowing’ within schooling systems, and how such policy-borrowing has very real effects in practice. The book introduces the Queensland, Australia, policy context from which much of the original empirical data informing the research has been derived. It also introduces some of the key conceptual resources that have been drawn upon to help make sense of these processes, particularly R.A.W. Rhodes’ notion of ‘interpretive governance’, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the world as comprising various social fields. The chapter ‘sets the scene’ for understanding how the rise of accountability logics is variously interpreted by educators who comprise the field of schooling practices, and how such interpretation is heavily contested. This includes tensions between more reductive, performative conceptions of accountability, and what are described as more ‘authentic accountabilities’. While more performative accountabilities emphasize attention to particular teaching practices and outcomes for their own sake, more authentic accountabilities take context seriously, and seek to foster the conditions for enhanced and substantive learning for all students.
