The distinction of excellent students in the Portuguese state school as a strategy of educational marketing accountability

1 23 Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability International Journal of Policy, Practice and Research ISSN 1874-8597 Educ Asse Eval Acc DOI 10.1007/s11092-019-09298-4 The distinction of excellent students in the Portuguese state school as a strategy of educational marketing accountability Leonor L.Torres, José A.Palhares & Almerindo J.Afonso 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. The distinction of excellent students in the Portuguese state school as a strategy of educational marketing accountability Leonor L. Torres 1 &José A. Palhares 1 &Almerindo J. Afonso 1 Received: 6 April 2018 /Accepted: 23 April 2019/ #Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract The mechanisms of academic distinction of the best students, such as the Honours Boards of Excellence and Value, emerge in Portuguese state schools as important institutional management strategies for promoting the school image and attracting the best students. This is what the authors propose to discuss, and that they identify as being a new form of accountability—the educational marketing accountability.Inother words, at the theoretical level, this article intends to explore the relationship between the results obtained by students, the promotion of academic excellence and a new form of accountability in the Portuguese non-higher education system. The empirical focus was the analysis of the institutional marketing strategies of management adopted by the head teachers and their impact on the school choice by the students. The authors used data from a questionnaire applied to students from four secondary schools who were asked to complete, interviews with head teachers and content analysis of documents from most Portuguese schools with academic distinction rituals. The research confirms the obsessive centrality of academic results in the daily management of schools; simultaneously, the distinction of the best students is an institutional marketing strategy that influences the choice of school, projects a desired social image and further reinforces the performance and leadership style of the head teachers. Keywords Marketingaccountability.Managementschoolexcellence.Academicresults. Academic distinction Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-019-09298-4 *Leonor L. Torres [email protected] José A. Palhares [email protected] Almerindo J. Afonso [email protected] 1 Research Centre on Education (CIEd), Institute of Education of University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal Author's personal copy 1 Introduction Having failed to achieve some of the democratic and egalitarian challenges of education, which were posed with urgency to the Portuguese society after the revolution of April 1974, in the last two decades, the educational system has begun to move towards more (re)meritocratic and performative logics. The democratisation of education intended to open the school to all at a time when it was found that more than 30% of the Portuguese population was illiterate. Since then, access has been universalized, but significant social and educational cleavages have continued to persist within the educational system. In the long authoritarian regime that preceded the democratic revolution, meritocracy was a useful belief, which (supposedly) justified the access and success of some individuals to dominant political and economic circles, and thus legitimised, ideologically, the selective exercise of important functions in public administration. In Portuguese schools, meritocracy was very close to the conception criticised by Michael D. Young (2008,p.xiii),traducedbyBthe proposition that I.Q. + effort = merit^. As the author ironically pointed out, in a meritocratic society Bindividual merit should be the only test that should be applied^and people are assigned to classes according to Btheir achievement rather than ascribed by their birth^ (p. xiii). These assumptions are clearly called into question by the democratisation of the regime, completely averse to any Baristocracy of talent^until, at the end of the 1990s, its presuppositions resurfaced by the hand of ex-left-wing intellectuals, in some cases reconverted to neoconservative and neoliberal orientations. This is what we call (re)meritocratization of the educational system, alongside the unfinished project of a truly democratic school. It can be said that today we update what was written two decades ago about the emergence of a Btension between the democratic school and the meritocratic school –a tension that was fed by the gradual predominance of the needs of the accumulation process (requiring a more elitist system, a more instrumental curriculum and an early recognition of the capacities) against the accumulation context, more consistent with equal opportunities^(Afonso 1998,p.278). There are many models and relatively distinct concepts of accountability (see, for example, Ng 2010), in the Portuguese context, and in many other countries in the last decades. The pressure for the introduction of new mechanisms of accountability in the education system derives mainly from the implementation of external national or international examinations and standardised tests, and the correlative scrutiny that stems from the publication of rankings based on the results obtained in these systems of assessment and evaluation (Meuret 2012; Dutercq and Maroy 2014;Hardy2015). In the dawn of a new public management (see, among others, Verger and Curran 2014), adjustment devices of the quality of state schools have also emerged, namely the programme for the external evaluation of schools, with the scale of the academic results taking centre stage (here as well). So, between civil society and the market, which pressured the emergence of rankings supported by the media (Baroutsis 2016), and the State (who set in motion central devices for the supposed evaluation of the system’s efficiency and effectiveness), mechanisms of accountability were created that are not unrelated to the inevitable comparison with the new educational market headed by private and cooperative education schools (charter schools or academies and free schools). If the impact of the rankings in itself contained publicity elements of the performance of schools at the external level (national, regional and local), it was, however, Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy also necessary to highlight the academic performance of students at the internal and local level. The ritualisation of the school excellence of students (e.g. Honours Boards of Excellence and Value and public ceremonies in the school and community) is now an additional institutional marketing strategy, considered an important part in attracting the best students, against a backdrop of sharp demographic decline of the Portuguese school age population. The place of the school in the rankings, the boards and the rituals of academic distinction of the best students, and the placement of these students in socially more prestigious higher education courses emerge as the most consistent indicators for the promotion of the social image of the school institution, all this having school results as a common denominator. This school image, anchored in performative indicators, is increasingly used as a management strategy to attract the best students and simultaneously as a reference for families and students (Antunes and Sá 2010)to choose the school that best fits their life project. In this text, we seek to understand the relationship between the expansion of the meritocratic culture in the Portuguese educational system and the development of governance and management strategies focused on the performance of the best students. These strategies tend to introduce new contours of institutional marketing centred on the promotion and ritualisation of academic excellence. At a time when the unipersonal management model of schools (centred on the role of the head teacher) assumes new forms of accountability, academic ritualisation and distinction emerge as internal strategies of school marketing, mainly due to increasingly higher external pressures from the strongly competitive environments. Therefore, the guiding question in this text can be formulated in the following terms: how are the strategies of distinction and ritualisation of the best students generating new forms of accountability congruent with the assumptions of the new public management? More so, what strategies do the head teachers adopt to keep their school attractive within the community and at the same time comply with the Bcontract^with the central administration of the Portuguese education system? We will try to answer these questions from three perspectives: (i) the formalisation and ritualisation of academic distinctions in Portuguese secondary schools, resulting from the analysis of the main guiding documents of school organisations; (ii) the management strategies used by the head teachers in order to build a social image of school, collected through semi-structured interviews; and (iii) the school choices identified in the responses given by the students in a questionnaire survey. 2 Accountability and school excellence Considering different countries and analysing their educational agendas, we can see that the statements, legal regulations and institutional and organisational practices are becoming more common, in what concerns, directly or indirectly, the policies, systems or models of accountability (Parcerisa and Verger 2016). This is not a finding without precedent, given that, in many cases, the policies of accountability can be thought of in a certain diachrony, where we can find identifiable and reconstitutable facts and reasons, and where it is possible to realise specific features or similarities, as well as differences, when referenced to the current historical conjuncture. So, if, for example, we consider the Portuguese context and go back half a century, we can see that the authoritarian and non-democratic nature of the State and its bureaucratic administrative Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy machine imposed an accountability model. This model was translated mainly by maximising the assessment component as a central control device (an essential function, for example, of the old, non-standardised national examination) and by forms of hierarchical and coercive accountability, together with devices to monitor and maintain confidentiality. However, this scenario is radically incompatible with the right to information when facilitated by the transparency of procedures and the participation of citizens. With the democratisation of the country, the previous bureaucratic and authoritarian accountability model became fragmented into partial forms of accountability. These, although supported by a legal bureaucratic rationality, became permeable, separately and according to the services and sectors of the State and public administration, to the values of transparency, democracy and participation, albeit with very different degrees of intensity, and not always consolidated (Nunes et al. 2003; Afonso 2010a,2014). The gradual penetration of principles of the new public management among many other factors induced or hastened the redefinition of the role of the State and the reconfiguration of the traditional boundaries between the public and private sectors (Verger and Normand 2015; Derouet et al. 2015). In some cases, these came closer to already established models and, in other cases, were simply new forms of accountability, which translate, in this new context, into dynamics that gradually emerged, either brought on by specific political guidelines or pushed by the schools and/or school clusters themselves. Examples of this are the current model of external evaluation of schools, the current model of administration of schools, the school rankings based on the results of standardised tests, the devices to academically distinguish the best students, and the sophistication of the mechanisms for the management of the school’s social image. In fact, there are today in the Portuguese educational system models and partial forms of accountability of a managerial, bureaucratic, social, market and community nature that result from different visions and appropriations of all the actors and school and non-school instances, which hinders the summary of this hybridity. If, as we hope, the challenge is the analysis of possible (dis)articulations and (in)congruencies between conceptions of school excellence and partial models and forms of accountability, the task becomes more difficult, even though it is also very interesting from the sociological point of view. In an exploratory exercise, it would be interesting to start from the following finding: in the authoritarian regime in force prior to April 1974, state schools in Portugal publicised excellence considering not only the academic performance of students but also the values, attitudes and behaviours. In this highly centralised and panoptic political system, the dominant accountability model within the education system was the bureaucratic and hierarchical model. This model also included a socio-familial dimension, in a time when the excellent students were awarded and these distinctions were only known within the school community and local environment. On the other hand, in the context of the representative democracy regime, but with growing influence from neoliberal and neoconservative agendas, the valuation and publicising of excellence re-emerges, in many situations, based exclusively and very narrowly on the academic performance of students. In this latter case, the partial forms of accountability translate or result from the hybrid interpenetration of the managerial, market (or quasimarket), community and social or active citizenship dimensions. If, on the contrary, we think from a purposeful perspective—one that advocates the construction of Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy multidimensional school excellence, based on the promotion of the overall success for all with justice and equity, a more consistent system of accountability would have to mainly articulate dimensions of the professional, the community and the social or active citizenship models (Afonso 2010b). With the new wave of national examinations as (further) control devices, and the adoption of other forms of comparative standardised assessment, mechanisms of academic distinction of the best students begin to proliferate in Portuguese state schools and/or school clusters, among which the honours boards of excellence and value stand out. Moreover, this trend is not exclusive to the Portuguese reality, being an educational phenomenon observed on a global scale, as demonstrated in the study of Torres and Quaresma (2017). In this context, we can now speak of the resignification of another form of accountability (which, although customary in organisations of a different nature, is only now starting to spread to state schools), which we propose here to call educational marketing accountability. That is, a model of accountability, which, as a result of selective practices of assessment, expands the social exposure of the best academic results, with the aim of promoting the public image of schools and, thus, increase the demand for new student enrolments while maintaining the places in the institutional rankings. It is therefore something more than a simple strategy for the advertising or publicity of education (educational marketing), because it serves objectively to give an account (answerability) of school work, with specific consequences in organisational terms, as well as implications for the definition of personal and academic paths. This other form of accountability—marketing accountability—originates in the school itself and explicitly aims at the wide publicity of its excellent results, and the induction of demand through an educational offer of supposed excellence. The widespread publicity of school results, especially national exams, has been propelled by the mass media through the establishment of school rankings. This constitutes an external pressure which disseminates a school image—itself based on school results—with which managers (head teachers and other school structures) cannot interfere. However, when this publicity originates from the interior and with the schools’initiative—in the use of their margins of relative autonomy—we are confronted with a new reality. In addition to seeking to generate market effects in the educational supply and demand dynamics, educational marketing accountability also seeks to legitimise the action of the governing bodies of the school, build a school culture and its prestige in the community, increase a sense of belonging and self-esteem (between teachers, students and non-teaching staff), generate socialising effects, among other aspects. Therefore, in our perspective, it is not just a matter of marketing because schools and/or school clusters, when choosing to distinguish excellence, are also giving this action a symbolic and identity meaning (Torres 2014,2015). This distinction of excellence also serves as a reference for pedagogical action focused on obtaining results agreed with the central authority and regularly scrutinised by the inspection mechanisms and by the community. What is relatively new in Portugal is that the awards of academic distinction are now widely publicised. As a consequence, school managers trigger around these prizes other rituals that converge and legitimise their school leadership style. We believe, therefore, that this set of procedures—which include evaluation, answerability and its consequences (prizes)—are related to marketing accountability. Finally, if we consider a complete model of accountability when the pillars of the evaluation,answerability and responsibilization are articulated in some way, we often Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy find that the nature of the responsibilization or enforcement (that is, if the expected consequences are negative or positive) tends to become the predominant criterion for characterising a particular model. In this sense, the most usual designations oscillate between soft accountability and hard accountability models. In our research, we understand that the emergence of an educational marketing accountability model is also a form of soft accountability, since school managers aim to promote, as a desired consequence, a positive image of the school to attract the best students (as producers of excellent academic results). 3 The return of the meritocratic ideology Since the 1980s, academic excellence has become a recurring theme in political discourses on education, assuming an increasing importance when associated with the concerns relating to the quality, competitiveness, merit and effectiveness of the educational system. At the European level, the priority tended to focus on the development of competitive educational systems, regulated by the economic interests and needs of the market and by forms of effective governance and consistent performance (Ball 2000; Ward 2012). In political orientations mainly supported by certain sectors of the ruling classes and the middle classes, the political emphasis placed on the production of educational outcomes was accompanied by the pressure for the reconfiguration of the mission of state schools, progressively more hostage of individual performance and accountability based on the publication of evaluation results and standardised tests (meritocratic mandate) and less involved in the consolidation of the democratisation of school processes (democratic mandate). As some countries have started to combat school failure and dropout, the demands placed on the production of academic excellence were intensified, in a clear adherence to the cult of meritocracy (McNamee and Miller Jr 2004; Dench 2006). Studies on the meaning of merit and the role of schools in its construction multiplied, arriving at different positions regarding the centrality of the meritocratic ideology in the processes of education regulation (Daverne and Dutercq 2008; Duru-Bellat 2009;Michaud2009;Dutercq and Daverne 2009;Tenret2011; Daverne and Dutercq 2013). On the other hand, the debate expands internationally in order to assess the effects of this agenda in the elitisation processes of education (Van Zanten et al. 2015;Blackmore2016; Maxwell and Aggleton 2016). Inserted in this broader framework, the Portuguese education system presents some difficulties in reconciling the mandates that are now required to it. Unlike many countries in Europe, the Portuguese state school is characterised by quality and performance standards that are not very different from private education. State schools outnumber private schools, approaching the same philosophy of the comprehensive schools, assuming several educational mandates—aimed to the democratisation of education— and being inclusive of all socio-economic classes. Recurrent in the political debate, the discussion about school excellence in Portugal has had frequent translation in the media and was also included in some works of academic nature (Magalhães and Stoer 2002;Cortesãoetal.2007;Quaresma2010; Palhares and Torres 2015; Torres and Quaresma 2017; Palhares and Torres 2017). From a political point of view, the values of excellence and merit were disputed by all political ideologies, including an avant-la-lettre discussion, carried out by both leftEducational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy wing intellectuals and conservative politicians. Although the various political forces have captured the meritocratic ideology, seeming to be a consensual and shared model, the criteria deployed for the definition of excellence are very variable. On the one hand, the restrictive and unidimensional nature of school excellence, based on the Bschooling of merit^(Tenret 2011), is questioned and, on the other hand, a more pluralistic perspective of excellence is advocated, which is considered to be more reconcilable with the democratic nature of state schools. The diversification of forms of excellence seems to constitute a new political concern in Portugal, with the redefinition of education for citizenship (Legislative Order no. 6173/2016 2016, of 10 May) and with the new competences inscribed in the new student’s profile of compulsory schooling, as part of a process to promote autonomy and curricular flexibility (Legislative Order no. 5908/2017 2017, of 5 July). Within a context increasingly marked by the principles of the new public management, educational guidelines aimed at producing measurable results are recurrent and multiply in various social and educational spaces and times, and under the aegis and impetus of several instances of national and international regulation. Figure 1tries to flag some of the guidelines implemented and ongoing in Portuguese society. A first block of measures coming from the central administration (State) fall on the mandatory nature of national examinations at all levels of education, alongside the creation of the honour’s boards of excellence, which came to be implemented in the vast majority of schools. In parallel with the implementation of the external evaluation programme of schools from 2006, we saw the change in powers of the local administration of schools, with the implementation of a single-person management model more consistent with forms of regulation typical of the new public management. A second block of measures, driven by the community/civil society (namely by the pressure of families) and the market, emphasises the expansion of non-formal contexts of education with strong connections and articulations with formal education—for example, the articulation of music academies with state schools within the scope of musical and artistic education and the growth of the private tutoring market. The impact of the publication of educational outcomes is also noticeable in Fig. 1, either through the dissemination of school rankings based on the results of the national examinations or by the effect of participating in comparative international evaluations (Programme for International Student Assessment—PISA; Trends in International Mathematics and Sciences Study—TIMSS; Progress in International Reading Literacy Study—PIRLS; among others). 4 Methodological framework The empirical evidence uses data from a recently concluded research project on the construction of academic excellence in the Portuguese state school, anchored in a multiscale methodology that included two complementary approaches. The first, of an extensive and macro-analytical nature, is focused on the mapping of the policies and practices of academic distinction of the best students. We collected an extensive set of documentary information, which proved to be essential to understanding the real impact of the meritocratic ideology on the regulation of school life. We analysed the web pages of schools (school year 2013–2014), collecting in a first stage around 1500 Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy The promotion of an image is not just for external purposes, it is also a selfimage, it is, in the end, an identity. We have created a concept and a set of branding and pure marketing actions, of creation of a brand, creation of a symbol, a logo, of a whole set of actions with the clear concern in mind of creating an image and introducing a new element. (HT5). In the last decade, the governance model of Portuguese schools went through a significant change in political terms that led to the reintroduction of a Bone-person^ leadership model (head teacher) in place of a collegiate management, which had been in use from 1974 until 2008. This new management model has concentrated several powers on the head teacher, namely concerning the appointment of his team and pedagogical intermediate leaderships. However, being even more strengthened within the school, the head teacher remains hostage from outside (central administration and community). He is, therefore, more subject to the mechanisms of answerability and responsibility. Without much challenge (Torres et al. 2014), this transformation of the face of the school created the conditions to give visibility to the rules of new public management and the partial model of accountability. The commitments made by the head teacher to the school and the local community, formalised in the Intervention Project at the time of his or her candidacy, and the need to fulfil the contracts signed with the central administration make this leader hostage of objectifiable and measurable goals, in most cases related to the students’school success and the institution’s performance level. In a scenario of demographic decline, rationalisation of resources and competition between schools, the head teacher’s strategies focus also on the construction of a public image of the institution anchored in the academic outcomes of students. The media, responsible in a first instance for publicising the exam results and the corresponding school rankings, appears now as one of the central actors of an education (quasi) market, which either regulates the competitive position of the school at a local and national level or works as a space where episodes of daily school life converge, disputed by leadership when it comes to publicising the good practices of the institution. If we consider, for example, some of the specificities of the French educational system, where Baccountability is more present in discourse than in education policy and its function is first of all rhetorical^(Dutercq 2016, p. 145), even so, the Bobligation to perform^and a Blegitimacy based on accountability^(Dutercq 2015,p. 44) also serve from our point of view to explain, at least in part, the action of Portuguese head teachers. 7 The school choice in the students’perspectives The proximity of the school in relation to the family residence was for a long time the main criterion for the admission of students to Portuguese state schools. To overcome this constraint, many families strategically explored flaws in the law so that they could choose the school that was more adjusted to the interests of the life project of the student. With the introduction of the school clusters, organised in a sequential logic of the educational cycles, the matter of residence is no longer that urgent, even though it did make it possible to freely choose the institution and its educational project. More recently, the signing of school autonomy contracts with the central government opened Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy the way to negotiate more flexible criteria for the admission of students, and the central role of merit as a selection criterion is already visible in many schools. If the role of families can be decisive in the school choice in the elementary stages of education, the same does not seem to generally occur when we study the options of secondary education students, as we will observe further on (Fig. 2). As we saw in the previous point, the head teacher is emerging as a key agent in the articulation of the policy guidelines in the local context, governing and communicating in the education system through performance indicators; in turn, secondary education students (10th to 12th years of schooling) reappear as a target subject of the education policies, being encouraged to give their best in favour of their future, but also of the institution, particularly by obtaining good results in the national examinations at the end of the cycle that are decisive for their access to higher education. The distinction of the best students in rituals and public celebrations is founded on traditional meritocratic principles (skills or capabilities plus effort) and establishes a benchmark of the pedagogical and educational work of the institution, the latter being increasingly dependent on public performance indicators that can project it and ensure its survival in the educational market. The timely definition of the life project seems to be crucial to outline the students’ education and training path, particularly those who obtain high academic performance. When we asked students about the three main reasons for their choice of the school they attended in secondary education, their responses pointed, above all, to reasons of a performative, prospective and pedagogical nature (see Fig. 2), as demonstrated by preliminary studies carried out in the scope of this issue (Palhares and Torres 2015). The most consistent responses underlined the need for the school to have a demanding and quality education, in order to properly prepare students for higher education and to have a good learning environment, despite the first two reasons being mainly brought up by students with excellent performance. No less important, the proximity to the place of residence seems to be, also for the excellent students, a reason to consider, and this choice is associated to a climate of emotional stability favourable to their academic performance. On the other hand, students not belonging to the excellent group do not value these choices with the same intensity and conviction, adding differences of a relational, convivial and symbolic nature. 0 102030405060708090 My parents enrolled me in this school I had friends attending this school I had relatives attending this school This school was nearer to my home For being a school with rigorous teaching and high standards of education For being a school that provided a good preparation for higher education I related to the type of education provided by this school For being a school with an excellent reputation For being a school well positioned in the national rankings of schools For being a school with good infrastructures For being a school with a good learning environment Non-excellent Excellent Fig. 2 Reasons for the school choice. Source: Surveys by questionnaire administered to excellent and nonexcellent students of 4 schools (2013/2014). Program used: Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011 Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy The data from the previous figure project a scenario somewhat dissonant compared with the perspective of the head teachers on the fabrication of a school image and its importance in the Portuguese education (quasi) market. In fact, from the list of reasons given here, the one that showed to be less conclusive for the choice of school was precisely the one that equated the Bexcellent social image^of the institution. Also, the place that it occupied on the national rankings does not seem to have gathered the first preferences of the students surveyed: it shows as the fifth most invoked reason, but denoting irrelevant differences among excellent and non-excellent students, without statistical significance when we consider the gender and social class variables, although the attendance in school 1, and even in school 2, introduces a clear academic distinction in the preferences of students (see Fig. 3). The supposed dissonance may, after all, be more apparent than real, being perhaps more indicative of an education market that is still inconsistent, but that gradually Dimension 1 – School Dispositions and School choice 1.51.00.50.0-0.5-1.0-1.5 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 -0.5 -1.0 -1.5 School_near School_4 School_3 School_2 School_1 A- / A+ B / B+ C / BCor less Parents_enrolled_me Related_type_educ AEpl OO EE TIpl TI PTE EDL Relatives_school Friends_school Rigorous_teaching Good_infrastructures Excell_reputation Good_learn_environ Well_posit_rankings Prep_Higher_Educ CLUSTER 3 CLUSTER 2 CLUSTER 1 Dimension 2 –The Effect of School Fig. 3 Configuration of the school choice. Reasons for the school choice: [♦] Cluster number of case (cluster 1, cluster 2, cluster 3); [◇] indicator of family’s social class (EDL—entrepreneurs and executives; PTE—professionals and managers; TI, TIpl—self-employed and pluri-active self-employed; EE—routine employees; OO—industrial workers; AEpl—pluri-active farmers); [ ] secondary school case study (school 1, school 2, school 3); [▷] secondary school’s grade point average (C−or less; C/B−;B/B+;A−/A+); [■]for being a school that provided a good preparation for higher education; [♦] for being a school well positioned in the national rankings of schools; [●] for being a school with a good learning environment; [▲]forbeinga school with an excellent reputation; [ ] for being a school with good infrastructures; [ ] for being a school with rigorous teaching and high standards of education; [✴] I had friends attending this school; [□]Ihad relatives attending this school; [⨝] I related to the type of education provided by this school; [ ] my parents enrolled me in this school; [+] this school was nearer to my home. Program used: Export from IBM SPSS Statistics (v.24) as *.eps format and later edited on Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows 2013 Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy develops articulations among the various elements that compose it. It seems clear that, for head teachers, institutional marketing uses the test results as a lever for promoting the image of the school and the consequent attraction of students; in turn, for students and their families, the search for a school with rigorous teaching and high standards that provided good preparation for access to higher education functions as a projection based on the effects of socially constructed representations from the relative place of the institution in the school network and the identification with the social experiences shared in several networks of inter-knowledge. Looking to explore an approach to the social space behind the choice of school, we performed a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) using the software IBM SPSS Statistics (v. 23.0), whose plot resulting from the optimal scaling procedure can be seen in Fig. 3. We decided to retain three dimensions, having taken from their scores three clusters that we projected in plan 1*2 of the MCA, as this provides a greater segmentation, and correlative cross-reading, on the reasons for the choice of school among the students surveyed. In this sense, two dimensions intersect in this plot which we call Bschool dispositions and school choice^(dimension 1) and Bschool effect^(dimension 2), with a respective inertia of 0.173 and 0.132. The contribution of the first axis tends to emphasise a school choice guided by performance criteria, as opposed to a choice justified by pragmatism and sociability reasons. The discrimination provided by axis 2 highlights the specificity of schools whose educational dynamics turn away from, or do not focus on, the logics inherent to the production of results. Three clusters resulted from this analytical exercise, with the reasons for the school choice summarised as follows: (i) cluster 1 (49.8%)—school which provides a good preparation for higher education, with a demanding and quality education, well positioned in the rankings, attended by students from various socio-economic backgrounds, with emphasis on the parents being professionals and managers (technical and staff professionals—PTE), that is, parents who have professions based on a higher level of education. The two schools (school 1 and school 2) included in this cluster, attracting mainly students of the middle and upper middle class (more than 50% of the students fall in the PTE and EDL strata), are generally open to cultural and social diversity, so that academic results are not directly associated to the highest level of the scale; (ii) cluster 2 (26.7%)—the most identified choices in this cluster refer to the proximity of the school in relation to the residence and the fact that it was the parents’decision to enrol them in that school. School 3 is the one that best fits this profile; of those studied, it is the one that presents a social composition more concentrated in the two more privileged social classes. The academic performance of the students allocated in this cluster is similar to that observed in cluster 1 with respect to the classifications at the A −/A+ level; (iii) cluster 3—by identifying themselves with the type of education provided in the school, the reputation and environment of the school, the fact that they have friends there, the students that comprise this cluster tend to attend school 4, a school that socially welcomes middle and popular classes, with academic performances that match the lower points of the scale in use. In summary, having observed the head teachers’concern to disseminate an appealing school image, resorting to marketing strategies anchored in good academic performance, the data we discuss in this section indicate the dynamics of school choice articulated with representations that were built in the community about the school institution. To give an account (answerability) of school work to the community— Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy especially student performance in national examinations and access to higher education—works as a Bcalling card^when the time comes for young people and families to decide, at a crucial moment, on the educational and professional pathway. 8 Conclusion Throughout the text we demonstrate the expansion of the meritocratic ideology in Portuguese schools and/or school clusters through the adhesion of these educational institutions to the rituals of distinction and award of academic excellence, among other strategies to publicise the social image of the school. This movement differed from other historical periods, when the ideology of meritocracy prevailed. Nowadays, we are faced with a movement of (re)meritocracy which embraces new specificities such as the pressure of the families, or if we prefer, the power of parentocracy (Brown 1990). In synchrony with this movement, or as a result, in Portugal, there was a change in the governance model of schools under the pretext of overcoming the old bureaucraticprofessional logics of accountability and making the processes more transparent and congruent with the logic of new public management. The centrality of the manager, or the re-emergence of the Bone-person^leadership model (head teacher), and the devaluation of collegiality in the administration of the state public school can be related with the growing democratic erosion in society in general and the concurrent ritualisation of the political, civic and educational participation processes (Lima 2011). The representation of the school, configured in a single entity, and the ease of communication and accountability with the State and the community were arguments that paved the way for such a change to materialise. Also, the increase of external pressure through the dissemination of the school rankings (by the mass media) and the external evaluation model, both overvaluing the academic performance of the students, brought to the surfaced an obsession with measurable results that created a technocratic evaluation (evaluocracy) without precedent. Without obeying to any guidelines imposed by the Ministry of Education, schools began to reposition themselves in the emerging educational market, restoring, for that purpose, distinction mechanisms for the best students which have become important pillars of the new educational marketing. Even though there are also ways of distinguishing students based on behaviours, attitudes and values, what is certain is that the vast majority of Portuguese schools have chosen to reward academic results only. This meritocratic isomorphism observed in the universe of schools has become the cornerstone of an increasingly performative and recurrent management style which aims to the construction of a successful school image. Therefore, the observation of multiple forms of marketing, leveraged by school results but also complemented by institutional representation in the most varied community and media contexts, brought to the debate the need to think about new forms of accountability adjusted to the current educational realities. Even in a centralised educational system, such as the Portuguese, where schools enjoy reduced autonomy, we notoriously observed many forms of distinction of the best students as well as their use as a device to improve school success. Predominating the organisational configuration of the school clusters (by grouping schools of different degrees of education), the award ceremonies of honour and excellence (at all levels of education) are celebratory moments open to the community Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability Author's personal copy which aim to consolidate the identity and the pedagogical virtuousness of these school clusters. It is true that in a territory where there are several school clusters, these ceremonies have all the more force and social impact the greater the number of distinguished students. However, the award of merit was also visible in schools and/ or school clusters not included in competitive territories, since they were the only existing educational alternative. In these cases, the performative level of students converges more towards the recognition of the school’s educational project and its leadership than to the construction of a school image with merely competitive ends. In the wake of recent theoretical proposals, we agree with the notion of Bmultiple forms of accountability^(Schillemans 2015; Pollock and Winton 2016), in relation to which the proposal of educational marketing accountability gains sense. For example, in the construction of school excellence based on measurable academic results, and given the central role of the school or school cluster head teacher, we are facing a partial form of accountability (managerial accountability), which does not cease to have a relationship with other partial forms, as it is required by civil society (social accountability) or, more consistent with the empirical data presented in this article, the one that induces school choice by publicising the performance of their best students (marketing accountability). Students and those responsible for the management of schools take the leading role in a new educational reality, which we call neo-meritocratic. The actions of these central actors are now converging and mutually reinforcing. To put it another way, the performance and academic success of some (students) is highly functional for an educational system whose institutional managers (head teachers) intentionally assume merit recognition as one of the strategies for the management of differences and inequalities. Because it is a state school, it is complex in organisational terms and plural in its audiences and in its mandates. We can now, as a conditional synthesis, confront the implementation plan of a common cultural minimum and, simultaneously, the utopia of the appreciation of the plurality of excellences (expressed by Collège de France / and Bourdieu 1985), with the evolution of the Portuguese post-democratic revolution educational reality. In recent decades, we have invested a great deal in terms of access to basic education for everyone, but many of the goals for a greater equity in the success and continuity of the school paths still remain to be achieved. 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