New Schemes of Accountability: Testing the Ideas in Brazil

On March 20, 2023, Mauro Moschetti presented “New Schemes of Accountability in Education: Participatory Designs and ‘Shared Accountabilities’” at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (PPGE) in Vitória, Brazil. The idea was to discuss how the project’s central proposal might work outside its original context, rather than simply report findings.

The core proposal

Performance-based accountability is the dominant instrument of educational governance today. It holds each school individually responsible for its results, and this often produces isolation and unproductive pressure. The project’s Shared Accountability Model (SAM) moves that responsibility to wider geographic areas and networks, so schools become aware of one another’s situations and commit to collective improvement.

A room built to test the idea

Around sixty people attended, including PPGE faculty and education authorities from Espírito Santo. That mix was useful: researchers engaged with the theoretical foundations of the model, while practitioners could judge whether it was feasible. Much of the session went into questions about how the idea travels — whether it resonates in Brazil, whether local experience already points in this direction, and where the institutional obstacles might appear.