Navigating between protocols and principles; An evaluation of the impact of Dutch school inspections: extended abstract

摘要

Inspectorates aim to safeguard school quality by visiting schools and providing school boards with a report of their findings. However, school quality is a notoriously diffuse concept, and research has shown that boards have limited control over educational quality (Honingh et al., 2018). In this project we adopt a group model building approach (Vennix, 1996; Richardson and Andersen, 1995) to evaluate the effects of inspections on Dutch schools. We start by asking school boards and teachers how they perceive the system that results in educational quality. Only after this system has been made explicit, we ask the next question: How does the Inspectorate affect the system that results in educational quality? By starting from the perspective of educational quality we enhance the identification of unintended effects that would remain hidden when reasoning from the perspective of inspections from the start, and we allow for the option that inspections have little effect on quality.