Pseudomorphosis of schools' system and the fiction of its regulatory processes: A study of educational narratives

Abstract

The inconsistencies between agents of the educational system, where it reigns tensions and disjointed mechanisms that express failures of multidisciplinary action, make schools behave like pseudomorphic systems. This article examines interactions between autonomy and control, resorting to a qualitative study with a quantitative approach to schools' strategic documents and inspectorate reports using NVivo. It provides a multiperspective cross-analysis of school narratives regarding (i) principals' vision, (ii) school strategic orientation, and (iii) internal and external evaluation reports. This article exposes how schools demand an organised, intentional, and planned way of using self-knowledge to enhance teaching and learning. It uncovers that innovation is an undervalued facet in the school organisation and a marginal element of the school evaluation. Additionally, it reveals system inconsistencies regarding external evaluation and school organisation. The difficulty of school change asserts that educational systems need to deepen interconnections to prevent schools from keeping a traditional functional structure masked by modern educational discourses, meaning pseudomorphic guidance.