Effective School Governance: Improving Performance and Reducing Achievement Gaps in Education? A Five Country Comparative and Longitudinal Analysis

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In the wake of New Public Management (NPM), a paradigm of effective school management based on principal/agent theory has become established worldwide. Its central hypothesis reads that the interaction of school autonomy, strong school leadership, highly qualified teachers, and regular performance tests increases educational performance and reduces performance differences against the effect of family background. This hypothesis is contradicted by the assumption that advantages in the availability of economic, social and cultural capital also become effective in the use of the new control instruments by parents and students, so that inequality in educational performance is maintained. This should be true all the more the greater the social inequality among students. There could be a vertical contrast between high and low educational achievement and a horizontal contrast between autonomous determination of the educational process and heteronomous control over this process, i.e. a stratification of the educational field into an autonomous elite, a middle class torn between expected self-determination and increased controls, and an underclass not reached by the controls. The evidence for these hypotheses will be examined on the basis of five countries selected according to educational regimes: the liberal regime of the United Kingdom, the egalitarian regime of Sweden, which switched to competition in the 1990s, the conservative federal regime of Germany, the regime of teacher professionalism of Finland, and the Confucian regime of South Korea. In the cultural, structural, and institutional context of these countries, NPM's steering instruments experience their own interpretation. This context forms the background and the basis of interpretation for the statistical analyses conducted in this project in three steps. In the first step, the educational field in the respective countries will be explored in its double dichotomy of high versus low educational achievement and autonomy versus heteronomy in the design of the educational process in the years 2000, 2009 and 2015 with the help of a principal component analysis and a multiple correspondence analysis using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In a second step, multi-level regression analyses at the school and student levels using the same data clarify to what extent the steering instruments have increased educational performance during this period and reduced performance differences. In the third step, these analyses are expanded to include the level of the countries that took the PISA test in each of these years. The same factors are recorded at the country level and supplemented by factors of per capita GDP, social inequality, the uniform or structured school system and the educational regime of a country.