Trust, Accountability and Capacity in Education System Reform

Global Perspectives in Comparative Education

Melanie Ehren, Jacqueline Baxter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000330908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation comparative

This global collection brings a new perspective to the field of comparative education by presenting trust, capacity and accountability as the three building blocks of education systems and education system reform. In exploring how these three factors relate to student learning outcomes across different international contexts, this book provides a powerful framework for a more equal system.

Drawing upon research and case studies from scholars, policymakers and experts from international agencies across five continents, this book shows how trust, capacity and accountability interact in ways and with consequences that vary among countries, pointing readers towards understanding potential leverage points for system change.

Trust, Accountability, and Capacity in Education System Reform illuminates how these three concepts are embedded in an institutional context temporally, socially and institutionally and offers an analysis that will be of use to researchers, policymakers and agencies working in comparative education and towards education system reform.

Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429344855

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TRUST, ACCOUNTABILITY AND CAPACITY

Three building blocks of education system reform

Melanie Ehren and Jacqueline Baxter

Introduction: A preoccupation with system change

Almost every country has undertaken some form of school system reform during the past two decades, trying to improve student outcomes and creating more equal systems. The quality of education is seen as one of the most important elements to the well-being of a country and its competitive advantage over other countries. International league tables (such as PISA or TIMSS) have sparked debates about the ‘best’ systems across the world where policymakers try and learn about successful reform strategies in their countries and how to replicate their success. However, systems are inherently complex; they have necessarily disparate goals and face different challenges as starting points for change vary as well as the socio-economic, cultural and political context of change.

Over the years, various authors in the field of comparative education have developed frameworks to understand education systems. Points of comparison have been as varied as looking at educational achievements, various policies, curricula, values and locus of decision-making where the country or nation-state has had particular prominence (Bray et al., 2014). International league tables, such as the OECD's PISA, emphasise academic outcomes and have generated great interest among policymakers and researchers alike to understand the high performance of countries such as Finland and Singapore. ‘What works' and the search for good practices underpin much of the interest in comparative education and many international agencies have long-term studies and projects to provide such insights. Examples are the OECD's ‘governing complex systems' project which has produced various working papers to, amongst others, understand accountability, knowledge governance and stakeholder involvement in education systems; the World Bank's SABER initiative has produced comparative data and knowledge on education policies and institutions in over 100 countries on policies as varied as early childhood development, student assessment and teacher policy to equity and inclusion, tertiary education and skills development, while UNESCO's annual Global Education Monitoring Report presents progress of 209 countries and territories towards the education targets in the sustainable development goals.

These studies have particularly produced cross-sectional data about a range of indicators and countries. Other studies, such as Mourshed et al. (2010) also aim to understand successful trajectories of system change. In their report, Mourshed et al. (2010) present clusters of interventions for systems that are either poor, fair, good or great, trying to outline a path for improving school system performance. The report has been highly influential in shaping policymakers' thinking about stages of development, but the report was also criticised for its simplicity. Coffield (2012) for example critiqued the lack of appreciation for the dynamic nature of change and the fact that the linear presentation of stages of change does not acknowledge the influence of history, culture, values, existing policies and structures, each of which will affect the success of reforms in different ways. Most of the comparative work, both in the academic field as by international agencies focuses on educational contexts, inputs and outputs, paying relatively little attention to indicators that help guide improvement in education governance of nation states, and how policy and reform processes are best realised, given the context in which they are introduced (Burns, 2012).

This book aims to understand education system performance and change through the lens of trust, accountability and capacity. The three variables and their interaction allow us to understand education systems from the perspective of inter-stakeholder relations (across the locational levels and for various demographic groups) and how these are situated both temporally as well as within the wider socio-economic, cultural and political context. We consider trust, capacity and accountability as the building blocks of any education system, and their interaction over time allows us to explain some of the possibilities and constraints for successful reform and how these may vary across countries. Trust for example allows us to explain the interactions between stakeholders such as policymakers, school leaders, teachers and parents involved in providing high-quality education and why collaboration between some stakeholders is more successful in building capacity for improvement. Capacity of stakeholders (their knowledge, skills and decision-making power) is needed to provide a high standard of education and deliver on their (new) responsibilities (once agreed on), while accountability provides a set of incentives for improvement, as well as information to understand where improvement is needed.

Trust, capacity and accountability are frequently studied and discussed separately in the field of political science, publication administration and education research on school effectiveness and improvement. There is however little discussion on how the three are related, both on the school level and on the system/policy/governance level. Throughout the book we will argue that it is particularly the interaction between trust, accountability and capacity that helps us understand performance of education systems and identify levers for change. Accountability and trust are for example considered beneficial for schools and systems to have or build the capacity for change, but both are at odds with one another where the direction of the relationship between trust and accountability is complex and bidirectional: accountability often destroys trust when governments introduce high-stakes external control in a context of distrust in schools and teachers. This phenomenon of ‘crowding out’ (see Gundlach and Cannon, 2010; Puranam and Vanneste, 2009) is well exemplified in South Africa where teachers and head teachers view eternal monitoring through their memories of the Apartheid regime where control equalled suppression instead of support for improvement.

Accountability may however also improve trust when locking partners into a sustainable collaboration and setting a clear set of performance standards that regulate their interaction. Ehren et al. (2015) work on school inspections in a number of European countries for example showed how inspection frameworks and standards created a common language for improvement and set of goals to word towards. Capacity, our third variable of interest, can be seen as an outcome of both trust and accountability: when teachers trust each other and collaborate well in developing a coherent curriculum the quality of school and student outcomes improve. Similarly, accountability, through the provision of performance feedback, is expected to improve schools and student learning, and many of such systems particularly aim to do so.

Any time a reform is rolled out, we thus need to think carefully about the available capacity, how people and organisations are held accountable and how actors in the system (students, parents, teachers, principals, school boards, policymakers) trust each other. Successful governance, according to Burns (2012), requires thinking about the individuals involved, their needs and their aspirations and how they interact. Some of the questions she poses are as follows:

‘Can parents rely on equal quality of teaching and learning across schools? Do teachers have similar working conditions and rewards? How are organisational stakeholders being included in the decision-making processes? And how worried do stakeholders have to be about corruption in the system? Do teachers (and principals, students and parents) have the capacity to deliver on their new responsibilities? If not, is training or other support in place? Do people and organisations trust each other to collaborate, do principals and teachers trust their government to let them decide on specific levels of implementation or is their agency taken away as soon as something goes wrong?’ These all affect the performance of a system and whether reform will happen. It is however these questions that often get lost when governments move forward with a new reform or policy (Burns and Cerna, 2016).

The set of questions to consider when looking at trust, accountability and capacity of schools and education systems are enormous and any attempt to answer them are challenging at best. We therefore start this book by presenting a framework to position trust, accountability and capacity as elements of, and processes in education systems that support or hamper learning and development of educators. We'll use Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory of human development which situates learning and development of individuals in a microsystem that is embedded in a meso (school)system, and in the institutional structure and social blueprint of an exo and macrosystem, subject to time in the chronosystem. In choosing a framework about human development to understand education systems, we argue that improvement of student learning is ultimately the outcome of how people behave and interact, where the improvement of teaching and learning of students requires a change in behavioural patterns of teachers, school leaders and other stakeholders in the system to more effective ways of working. In Chapter 2, we will present three ideal types of systems and use our triad of trust, accountability and capacity to describe how each system is vastly different in organising inter-stakeholder relations and creating or restricting opportunities for learning and development. Positioning trust, accountability and capacity in relation to system governance allows us to start unpacking the structural and temporal context of system performance and change. First we start by defining what we mean by ‘system’ and presenting Bronfenbrenner's systems approach to human development.

Defining ‘system’

‘Systems', their patterns of behaviour and elements, interconnections and functions or purposes, have been studied extensively in ecological science. Meadows (2008, p. 2) describes a system as ‘a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time’. The most obvious component parts of education systems would be the institutions and individual actors that operate together within a common legal and administrative framework (e.g. on examinations, conditions of service for teachers), according to Bray and Jiang (2014) and Snyder (2013). Through the interactions between individuals, such as teachers, parents, students, principals and policymakers, new structures and behaviours emerge as and when actors act and react to each other, learn and develop over time. The result, according to Snyder (2013), can be qualitatively different from the sum of individual actions and learning, such as when frequent contact between teachers in a school creates social capital and a safe school culture.

The description highlights the embedded nature of relations and how we can think of systems as a set of layers which interact in complex ways, but where the learning of an individual (through the interaction with his/her environment) lies at the heart of any system and system change. This understanding of how learning and development is embedded in a wider context is well described in Bronfenbrenner's (1989) ecological systems theory of human development. He uses a systems' perspective to understand the processes and results of human development as a common equation of man and environment, where he described human development as follows:

the process through which the growing person acquires a more extended differentiated, and valid conception of the ecological environment, and becomes motivated and able to engage in activities that reveal the properties of, sustain, or restructure that environment at levels of similar or greater complexity in form and content (Bronfenbrenner, 1989, p. 27; cited in Härkönen, 2005).

The underlying rationale of the theory is that human development results from an interaction of processes, person and context, where developmental processes and outcomes vary as a joint function of the characteristics of the person as well as the environment, and their interactions over the course of time (Bronfenbrenner, 1989, p. 200). The system's perspective conceptualises the learning and development as a set of concentric circles of an individual's microsystem, his/her mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem as depicted in Figure 1.1.

FIGURE 1.1Bronfenbrenner's (1989) ecological systems theory of human development

Source ¹: Vizcarrondo Oppenheimer, Vélez-Agosto, N. M., Soto-Crespo, J. G., Vizcarrondo-Oppenheimer, M., Vega-Molina, S., & García Coll, C. (2017). Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory revision: Moving culture from the macro into the micro. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 900–910 (Vélez-Agosto et al., 2017)

Various authors, such as Snyder (2013), Johnson (2008) and Godfrey (2014), have used Bronfenbrenner's work to understand school and system improvement, taking the development and learning of the school organisation as a starting point. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Trust, accountability and capacity: Three building blocks of education system reform
• 2 Governance of education systems: Trust, accountability and capacity in hierarchies, markets and networks
• 3 Trust-based accountability in education: The role of intrinsic motivation
• 4 Distrusting contexts and cultures and capacity for system-level improvement
• 5 Accountability to build school and system improvement capacity
• 6 Inner group trust and school autonomy in a segregated school system; parental self-segregation in the Netherlands
• 7 Trust, professional capacity and accountability in school improvement: Austria’s quality management system
• 8 Hierarchical structures with networks for accountability and capacity building in Singapore: An evolutionary approach
• 9 Educational technology to improve capacity – integrating adaptive education programmes in public school in Kenya
• 10 From hierarchy and market to hierarchy and network governance in Chile: Enhancing accountability, capacity and trust in public education
• 11 Contrasting approaches, comparable efficacy?: How macro-level trust influences teacher accountability in Finland and Singapore
• 12 Distrust, accountability and capacity in South Africa’s fragmented education system
• 13 Downward spiral or upward trajectory?: Building a public profession to meet the shifting technical, social and political demands of education
• 14 Trust, capacity and accountability: A triptych for improving learning outcomes
• Index