The Local Institutionalization of Accountability in Education: Network and Bureaucratic Modes of Implementation

Accountability policies have become more important in the educational sector over the last two decades. Arguing that these policies focus increasingly on the technical core, some scholars have recently challenged the enduring finding that classroom activities and teachers' practices are largely decoupled from their institutional environment. In this paper, we argue that this discussion could be enriched by taking into account the processes through which accountability policies are developed and implemented. Two contrasted processes of construction and implementation are compared regarding the extent to which they have an impact on the level of decoupling between the formal structure of evaluation and the teachers' practices. The results show that compared to the bureaucratic approach to educational reform, the network model of organizing is more favourable to the emergence of social and cognitive changes, which contribute to reduce the level of decoupling between the evaluation's mechanism and the teachers' practices.(1)