Increasing accountability in education in Paraná State, Brazil

School report cards as an experiment to increase accountability in education in Brazil

This briefing paper discusses the creation of school report cards (SRC) in Paraná State, Brazil, to inform school communities and stimulate greater involvement in the school improvement process. At the same time, Paraná encouraged the creation of new education stakeholder associations to increase community voice at the state policymaking level and to break the state government and teachers’ union monopoly of the education policy debate.

Some of the key conclusions include:

the accountability reforms - the development of SRC and parents’ councils - represent the first steps toward the difficult task of creating a culture of accountability focused on results
the low-stakes nature of accountability reforms made them politically feasible. A high-stakes SRC would have generated fierce opposition from teachers’ unions. The school principals’ perspective that they held the secretariat accountable also contributed to their acceptability
an important side-effect of the SRC is that by giving school-level data high visibility, school and parents’ councils became a small army of quality controllers, reporting discrepancies in state and national databases
another important side-effect of the creation of regional and statewide parents’ councils is that the number of actors engaging in policy debates at the state level increased and, more importantly, parents have a prominent voice in those debates for the first time
while the principal objective of the accountability reforms was to empower parents and give them the information needed to more effectively engage in public discourse, the SRC also focused teachers and parents on learning outcomes and questioned how they might improve their own schools’ performance.

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Increasing accountability in education in Paraná State, Brazil