Trajectories

Abstract

This chapter compares the trajectories of performance-based accountability policies in the French and Quebec education systems, from the 1960s to the end of the school year 2016–2017. Drawing on the perspective proposed by Stephen Ball on policy trajectory (1994), the idea here is not to provide the reader with a linear chronological presentation of the history of each policy but rather, following Foucault’s genealogical method, to contemplate policy as a moving construction of speeches, tools, and social relations whose configuration changes over time. In order to account for the trajectories, the chapter highlights three processes: path dependence on earlier choices which may be accompanied by gradual institutional changes; bricolage, as specific education policy work consisting of assembling heteroclite preformatted elements; and translation, by some actors, of policy ideas and instruments related to New Public Management. At the end, the policies’ features are different. In Quebec, “results-based management” policy is much more formalized legally and more stable due to the specificities of its trajectory (Canadian influence, institutionalization of school board, bricolages, and political alliances among parties and stakeholders); in France, the “steering by results” policy is rather a discursive construction by higher officers in the administration, variously supported and relayed by changing governments confronted with external pressures (Lisbon strategy) and internal institutional dependences and political pressures. At the same time, these trajectories lead to one major convergence, i.e., the establishment of a neo-statist version of performance-based accountability, where, above all, it is vertical policy and administrative regulation which are reinforced.