Targets, Threats and (dis)Trust: The Managerial Troika for Public School Principals in Chile

Public education in Chile has been steadily losing students as a result of the implementation, for the last 35 years, of a market model. In this paper we exemplify how a structural problem (public schools’ declining enrollment) created by neoliberal educational policies is transformed into an individual problem to be managed by the public school principal. Principals must sign a performance-based contract that specifies sanctions and incentives for meeting enrollment targets. The current paper examines, through data produced by in-depth interviews and shadowing, how 19 principals worked toward that Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 23 No. 87 Special Issue 2 target. Findings show that to manage enrollment principals spent, on average, 24% of their time performing marketing tasks. Principals, thus, have developed an entrepreneurial self, which is promoted by quasi-market school governance models. Through this entrepreneurship they manage various threats that represent barriers to the possibilities for meeting enrollment targets.


Introduction 1
Chile's constitution guarantees educational freedom, which involves freedom for entrepreneurs to open and operate a school as well as parents' freedom to choose among these schools.Chilean parents may "choose" to enroll their children in: (a) public 2 schools managed by municipal governments and funded through a State, attendance-based voucher, (b) private schools subsidized through the same voucher, (c) private schools fully funded by families, and (d) technicalvocational schools administered by private businesses or corporations.In1981 80% of the student population attended a public school (Elacqua, 2012).By 1998, public schools enrolled 55.1% of the students and private-subsidized schools 34.1% (Delannoy, 2000).These percentages had nearly reversed by 2011, with private-subsidized schools enrolling 51.8% of the students and public schools representing only 39.3% (Santiago, Benavides, Danielson, Goe, & Nusche, 2013).
This enrollment trend can be explained by educational policies promoting the neoliberal economic and cultural/identity project that began spreading throughout the world in the 1970s (Connell, Fawcett, & Meagher, 2009).The growth of private school attendance has been bolstered by: parents' beliefs that private schools are better than public schools; weak regulations that allow entrepreneurs to operate state-subsidized schools as for-profit businesses 3 , and policies that have weakened public education.In this paper we explore how a structural problem (public schools' declining enrollment) created by neoliberal policies is transformed into an individual problem to be managed by the public school principal.Principals must sign a performance-based contract that specifies, among other targets, increases in student enrollment and in scores on standardized tests.
The current paper draws data from two studies involving a total of 19 public schools (representing seven municipalities).All principals participated in a series of in-depth interviews and extensive shadowing was conducted with 13 of them.Using those data sources we analyze how they understood and attempted to meet enrollment targets.We explore tensions and contradictions as these principals are constructed and construct themselves as agents of change in pursuit of externally determined performance targets (Hall, 2013).
In what follows we first outline policies that have produced the steady decline in public school enrollments.Next, we focus on policy for public school principals, highlighting the operation of workplace demands that cast them as performative workers (Ball, 2003).These policies express a school governance model that mixes quasi-market and evaluative state logics through regulations that promote: a balance of system decentralization/ centralization, external evaluation, outcomesbased assessments, choice, autonomy with tighter control over teachers' and school leaders' work, and emphasis on extensive planning through school improvement plans (Ball, 2003;Cohen, 2014;Connell et al., 2009;Foster & Plowden, 1996, in Taylor, 2007;Hall, 2013;Maroy, 2004).

Policy Context: The Production of a Steady Decline in Public Schools' Enrollment
The promise of market competition and privatization of social services in general, and education in particular, is that citizens will receive better and more efficient professional services if they are positioned as consumers (Gentili, 1998;Hsieh & Urquiola, 2003).This repositioning started in Chile in 1981 when the military regime imposed cost-cutting, structural adjustment measures for the provision of educational services.The administration of public schools was transferred from the Ministry of Education to the municipal governments, while the Ministry kept central control of the K-12 curriculum and other technical inputs provided through regional offices.The transfer of responsibilities to municipal governments did not include public consultation, training to create local capacity or sufficient resources to support the provision of quality education (Delannoy, 2000).Alongside the processes of decentralization, a number of policies were designed to stimulate the participation of private providers in order to promote and affirm parents´ right and responsibility when choosing a school.Wittman's (2008) list of the key characteristics of New Public Management (NPM) finds expression in educational policies promoted in Chile since the restoration of democracy in 1990 (Montecinos, Pino, Campos, Dominguez, & Carreño, 2014).These policies aim at strengthening the participation of private providers, increasing external accountability, stimulating competition between public and private providers, institutionalizing parents/students as clients and consumers, and increasing decentralization and school-level autonomy to achieve centrally defined results.In the following sections each of these features of Chile's educational system is briefly exemplified to illustrate expectations regarding principals' new professionalism within the "classic NPM troika of markets, metrics and managers" (Hall, 2013, p. 269).

Strengthening the Participation of Private Providers
Beginning in 1993, a shared funding formula allowed private subsidized schools to charge tuition (co-payment), in addition to the voucher.By 2005 almost half of them charged tuition, increasing to 90% by 2008 (Raczynski, 2012).Each school sets the tuition value and has the authority to cancel enrollment if parents´ fail to pay or if students' present behavioral or academic problems 4 .
A clear effect of this policy has been an increase in the number of private schools as well as an increase in social class segregation with pupils increasingly attending schools with peers from their same socioeconomic group.Public education has become largely the alternative for families that can't afford the tuition charged by private schools or for children and youth rejected by private schools that view them as a liability for climbing up the rankings produced through various accountability measures.Eighty percent of students in public schools come from low-income or middle-low socioeconomic backgrounds, with only 20% of students from these backgrounds attending private subsidized schools (García-Huidobro, 2010).

Increasing Centrally Controlled Accountability
To inform consumers' choices, a national student-testing system (SIMCE) was introduced in the1980s to determine the performance, efficacy and efficiency of different schools (Maroy, 2004).Students are measured in grades 2 nd , 4 th , 6 th , 8 th and 10 th in the areas of mathematics, language arts, and science, plus English in 11 th grade.Additionally, samples of students are assessed in physical education and technology5 .Only since 1995-96 have SIMCE results been released to the public (OECD, 2004).
SIMCE is a low-stakes test for students but has high stakes for schools.Test scores have a significant weight in the National System for Performance Evaluation (SNED).SNED provides financial incentives to reward teachers in high performing subsidized schools (Delannoy, 2000;OECD, 2004).SIMCE scores weight 67% in the classification of schools in the Ley de Aseguramiento de la Calidad (Quality Assurance Law 20.529).This classification scheme is high stakes as it affords schools different levels of autonomy from government inspection and different levels of access to external technical support.The way in which SIMCE is tied to workplace conditions makes it difficult for teachers and principals to ignore state-mandated performance targets (Cohen, 2014).Carrasco's (2013) analysis of the role of SIMCE within Chile's educational system shows how SIMCE has come to create social practices that produce new subjectivities and social relations.For example, SIMCE6 makes selection, discrimination, and parental choice unproblematic.These are social practices that focus on education's role in developing human capital but ignore its role in promoting human rights (Anderson, 2011).SIMCE has become more of an end in itself than tools for helping schools improve, and it has narrowed how the general population defines education and educational quality (Carrasco, 2013;Taylor, 2007).

Stimulating Competition Among Public and Private Schools
All private schools define admissions criteria and select students/families accordingly.Public schools, on the other hand, are not allowed to select or expel students (some exceptions are made for secondary schools).Private subsidized schools charging a co-payment are more likely to be selective, selecting students based on families' ability to pay (Elacqua, 2012).Redondo et al. (2008) describe the process through which in the Chilean educational market, competition is among families (consumers) and not among schools (providers).Private schools use various selectivity processes to pull highest achieving students out of public schools (student creaming).Due to student creaming, lower tests scores are attained by public schools even when they improve their students' achievement (Linkow, Streich, & Jacob, 2011).
In Chile, the majority of the population believes that private schools provide students with a better education (Elacqua, Martínez, & Aninat, 2010).This perception could be based on highly publicized results from SIMCE and international testing programs (i.e.PISA), which show that, on average, public schools perform below private schools.Of course, media outlets do not explain how social segregation explains a large portion of this difference (Elacqua, 2012) nor problematize the limited definition of quality education entailed in SIMCE.A number of studies have shown that achievement differences between private subsidized and public schools on SIMCE are minimal or null after controlling for students' socioeconomic background (Mizala & Romaguera, 1998).

Institutionalizing Families and Students as Clients of Educational Providers
Gentili (1998) states that by transferring education from the political to the market sphere, education is no longer understood as a social right.Instead it becomes a commodity that can be purchased by consumers according to the capital that they have available (financial, social, symbolic, etc.).Choice in Chile has created a notoriously well-known inequitable educational system (OECD, 2015).Studies have shown that among Chilean families school choices are based on factors other than SIMCE scores (Chumacero, Gomez Caorsi, & Paredes, 2008).Parents from different socioeconomic groups differ in the elements they consider when choosing a school (Ball, Bowe, & Gerwitz, 1995).Low-income parents in Chile prioritize safety concerns and practicalities such as distance from work/home (Montecinos, Sisto & Ahumada, 2010;Taut et al., 2009).Schneider, Elacqua and Buckley (2006) found that choice among middle and upper socio-economic groups was influenced by the social class composition of the student body.Choice is dependent upon to the information available to parents and low-income parents cannot always access needed information (Rojas, 2009).
From a "supply" perspective, choice has prompted schools to implement a number of strategies to boost enrollment.Weinstein and colleagues (2012) identified five strategies used by Chilean principals working in public and private subsidized elementary schools located in low income communities: open a preschool program; strengthen and differentiate the school´s identity by attaching it to the locality or raising the status of families enrolling children at that school; increase the school's reputation by offering a wider range of non-academic services to show commitment to quality education; and publicize SIMCE scores.In the current study we restrict the sample to public schools, with all but two, classified as low performing and thus unable to use several of the strategies reported by Weinstein and colleagues (2012).
In the United States studies by Linkow and colleagues (2011) and Cohen (2014) have reported the use of similar strategies.Schools may provide additional services, such before-and after-school programs and access to comprehensive "wraparound" services from other local social and health services organizations.Cohen's (2014) study showed how market forces worked to pressure principals to engage in public relations to promote the school and manage the school's image.These practices hardly address the quality of the educational program provided by the school as they rely on marketing, rather than educational logics.
With the creation of Superintendecia de Educación (School Superintendence7 ), in 2012, Chilean parents who feel that their rights or their student´s rights have been violated by some action of the school can file a complaint that this office must investigate to ensure schools meet legal standards for operation.Biesta (2004) notes that through accountability agencies, such as the Superintendence, "the relationship between the state and its citizens is no longer a substantial relationship but has turned into a strictly formal relationship." (p. 238).This Superintendence reinforces the notion that problems between schools and parents are to be resolved through consumer forms of accountability, rather than through democratic forms of accountability.Following Ryan (2005), democratic accountability provides information to orient conversations among members of the school and the communities served by the school about values and interests that inform decisions regarding issues such as what to do, for what purposes, and how to improve education and student learning.
The policies we have discussed above show that in Chile public education is by design weak.To strengthen public education a new generation of policies has been developed based on a key assumption of the market model, the need for entrepreneurial autonomy.These policies purport to afford school administrators needed autonomy to manage the financial and pedagogical resources in order for the school to stay competitive.Autonomy allows principals to respond with greater efficiency and effectiveness to requests made either by educational authorities or by students/parents (Maroy, 2004;Weinstein, Muñoz, & Marfán, 2012).Gary Anderson (personal communication, March, 2015) notes that in the United States autonomy is undermined when performance targets defined outside the school walls drive classroom teaching.

Decentralization/autonomy for the School Principal
It is in 2005 when educational policymakers in Chile began to explicitly address the school principalship within the neoliberal framework for educational reform (Núñez, Weinstein, & Muñoz, 2010).The School Leadership Framework (Marco para la Buena Dirección) was developed in 2005, codifying the set of competencies needed to successfully lead a school.These competencies are organized into four dimensions: leadership, curricular management, management of the school climate, and resource management.Concurrently, a law defining the procedures for hiring, firing and evaluating a school principal was approved (Ley de Concursabilidad de Directores, Nº 20.006).This law was important at the time as it standardized and formalized the selection processes to prevent arbitrariness, such as a municipal mayor's office appointing political allies.
In 2011 the Ley de Calidad y Equidad de la Educación (LQE) stipulated new regulations for hiring public school principals through a competitive process; with the final decision placed in the hands of the city's mayor.To strengthen school leadership, among other things, this law specifies salary increases, performance-based bonuses, and the provision of competitive grants for enrollment in professional development courses.It also includes provisions for greater autonomy over staffing and budget matters.For example, each year a principal can fire up to 5% of teachers identified, through the national teacher assessment system, as underperforming.A new principal can bring with him or her two key members of the leadership team: (a) the director of the technical-pedagogical unit who acts as curriculum coordinator and (b) the general inspector who is typically responsible for monitoring and sanctioning students' behavior.
Municipal governments were provided new tools to define principal-employer relations to enable control of work priorities and processes (Evetts, 2011).Principals are required to sign a 5year contract and are directly responsible for the attainment of the predefined results specified in this contract.To achieve these results, the law states that principals need to focus on instructional leadership responsibilities, in addition to administrative tasks.Exhibit 1 presents a typical job advertisement, specifying the results to be achieved by the principal.Meeting the goals may lead to obtaining a financial bonus to termination of contract.
The principal's performance agreement contract promises to improve school's productivity through planning, implementation, and monitoring of various school processes and outcomes (Maxcy, 2009).The plan that principals must manage is framed by the Preferential Subsidy Law (SEP) introduced in 2008 to address inequity through a funding formula associated with the proportion of low-income students (priority students) enrolled in a subsidized school.By adding an extra per-pupil subsidy for each priority student (50 percent over the base voucher), SEP law recognizes that it is more costly to educate students growing up in a situation of social vulnerability (Valenzuela, Villarroel, & Villalobos, 2013).To become eligible for SEP monies participating schools cannot select priority students or charge parents a co-payment.
School improvement plans required by the SEP Law.Based on an institutional selfassessment, the school develops an improvement plan.This plan is a contract, Agreement of Equal Opportunities and Educational Excellence, the school's owner signs with the Ministry of Education.By 2009, 99.9% of public schools had signed their performance agreement with the Ministry to receive SEP funding.Although SEP is touted as a tool for decentralization, the Ministry predefines the outcomes to be achieved by the improvement plan (SIMCE scores) with little room to address school-specific aspects emerging from the institutional self-assessment (Weinstein, Fuenzalida, & Muñoz, 2010).Principals are explicitly required to focus their efforts on instructional leadership (i.e., setting high expectations, planning the instructional program, and conducting classroom Based on trends in SIMCE scores, and other indicators, schools are classified to determine how much monitoring/intervention they will receive from the Ministry of Education, with higher performing schools given greater autonomy to design and implement an improvement plan (see Table 2 for a description of this classification scheme).The reliance on external experts in the oversight of a school's improvement plan shifts trust in teachers' capacity and commitment to their students to those who audit teachers` work (Taylor, 2007).Ahumada's (2010) findings show that there is insufficient articulation among these various sets of laws and the intended improvement of equity and quality has not been achieved.This articulation, however, is expected to emerge as a result of fractal organizational logics by which each school is a microcosm of the district (Connell, Fawcett, and Meagher, 2009).Such logic for school governance underpins laws such as SEP and LQE as each individual's role (entrepreneurship) replicates the role of the larger unit in which she or he is embedded: "… each part of an organization functions like a profit-making firm, with its managers held accountable for the income/expenditure balance.… Individual workers are treated as firms, expected to follow a profit-making logic; and are held accountable to the organization in these terms, through 'performance management' schemes.(Connell et al., 2009, p. 334) In a weakened public educational system this fractal logic is highly problematic as it makes individual teachers and school leaders responsible for overcoming the financial crisis faced by many municipalities in Chile (Hsieh & Urquiola, 2003;Islas & Mardones, 2007).Declining enrollments have exacerbated the historical underfunding of public schools as funding is based on attendance.A survey conducted in 2007 with directors of municipal Departments of Education showed 45% indicated that their main priority was enrollment and attendance (Raczynski, 2012)-a concern that can be directly linked to the financial crisis.In order to increase enrollment, the fractal logic pushes public schools within a municipality to compete against each other.
In the current study we examine how 19 public school principals respond to their employer`s demands that they attract and retain students in the uneven playing field that has been generated by the marketization of education.The market model in which they must manage their school is expected to influence how they have come to understand themselves as professionals, their work priorities, and their relationships with employers as well as with parents/students (Ball, 2003;2010).

Method Overview of the Research Designs and Questions
Study 1.This 3-year longitudinal multiple case study focused on leadership practices during the process of elaborating and implementing school improvement plans within a SEP contract.The study involves six schools and examines practices in the areas of curriculum, school climate, and resources management and their impact on students' learning and on organizational learning.
Study 2. This is an ongoing 3-year longitudinal multiple case study focused on how 13 novice principals learn to become the instructional leaders expected by SEP and the LQE laws.For the current paper we draw data from the first year of data production.
Table 1 summarizes school level data showing that these 19 public schools are experiencing declining or fluctuating enrollments and low performance on SIMCE.A preliminary analysis of data produced in both studies showed that although SEP and LQE laws explicitly require principals to prioritize instructional leadership and participants shared this expectation; a large chunk of their time was devoted to managing enrollment.This finding is examined in the current manuscript through the following guiding research questions: 1. How do public school principals understand the causes for the enrollment trend in their schools?2. What do principals do, and why, to meet the enrollment goals defined in their contracts?

Participants
Study 1.Three urban and three rural schools that had just entered SEP were invited to be part of the study.In each school the principal, other members of the leadership team, teachers, parents, and students participated in the data production process.For the current paper only data produced with principals (four women and two men) have been analyzed.After explaining to them their rights and involvement over the duration of the study, all participants signed an Informed Consent.
Study 2. The national database for job advertisements for principal posts was examined during the last semester of 2013 and the first semester of 2014 to identify public schools within a region in Chile that hired a new principal.The Director of Education for each school identified was then contacted to learn if the candidate selected was a first-time principal and to request they invite all of their novice principals to be part of the study.Among the 14 principals referred by the Directors and contacted by the research team, 13 (11 women) signed an Informed Consent agreeing to participate in the study.

Data Sources and Procedures
Study 1.Each year a semi-structured in-depth interview was conducted with each of the six principals.In the first interview their leadership practices in the three areas of management were explored and in the second interview principals were asked to explain the context for implementing these practices.In the third interview principals were asked to identify and analyze factors that facilitated or made difficult the implementation of these practices.For the current paper we analyzed data from 18 in-depth interviews (36 hours of audio recording).
Study 2. Data production involved in-depth interviews and work shadowing.A total of three in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each principal: two within two to sixth months since they had started their appointment and one at the end of the academic year.The first interview focused on recruitment into the study, the selection process they had undergone, and their professional biography.In the second interview we asked about their initial assessment of the conditions at the school, the goals they expected to accomplish and the practices they wanted to implement to achieve those goals.In the third interview, principals were asked to reflect on the highlights of their first year as a school principal and what they had learned.A statistical summary of the activities recorded via shadowing was shared with participants asking them to reflect on the data.For the current paper we analyzed 39 in-depth interviews (65 hours of audio recording).
Work shadowing entailed a total of 25 days, as 12 of the 13 principals in Study 2 were observed for two days each, about 9 hours daily (McDonald, 2005).A researcher came to the school either with or before the arrival of the principal and left the school when the workday ended.These days were decided by the principal, with a request by the researcher to include a day in which he or she held a faculty meeting.During this time the researcher observed every activity in which the principal participated, except when the principal requested privacy.The researcher recorded, in writing, descriptive and reflective field notes about what was observed as well as comments made by the principal to the researcher.For every action, a starting and ending time were recorded as well as all the people involved.

Data Analysis
Shadowing.Field notes of the actions observed were entered into an Excel spread sheet.Actions were grouped into activities (e.g.action: present SIMCE data; Activity: faculty meeting).Two researchers independently labeled activities and actions.Following a discussion to agree on the labels that best represented the meaning of the activities and the actions, the same two researchers independently coded all actions.A third researcher audited this last set of coding.
Interviews.After the shadowing data were analyzed, two researchers independently read interview transcripts highlighting segments that made references to activities and actions associated with enrollment.The whole research team discussed identified segments to determine their relevance to enrollment issues as well as their relevance to the new professionalism promoted by performative cultures.Finally, a textual corpus was developed that illustrated principal's actions and rationale as they managed their school's enrollment.8

Results
Findings show that the performance agreement, with the sanctions it entailed, was at the forefront of principals' minds as they explained their sense of limited autonomy to manage resources and priorities.In varying degrees we observed principals engaging in five marketing strategies to attract and retain parents.The diversity and nature of the strategies, as well as principals' perspectives, provide evidence for Ball's (2003) findings with regard to how new forms of entrepreneurial control act on educational professionals' subjectivities.Principals are hired to become their schools' instructional leaders, but as they become aware of the need to compete for students, they remove themselves from this instructional role and move closer to the role of fundraisers and marketing directors.The principal becomes the agent of the municipality's priorities to increase enrollment thus ensuring the needed funding that comes with attendance.

Principals' Limited Autonomy
Participating principals were strong advocates for public education and expressed a genuine interest in lifting public schools from their current situation.As we walked though one of the participating high schools, we noticed many empty classrooms as this school was built for about 2000 students but at the time enrollment was slightly less than 1200.The lack of funding that came with low enrollment generated problems for keeping up the school infrastructure, as evidenced in athletics facilities in dire need of repairs.Although municipal governments had not defined a minimum enrollment, principals in smaller schools lived under the constant threat of a possible school closure: When I took the post, we only had 160 [students] enrolled and last year [the school] had 400, then declined to 320, then it got super serious, serious, serious.(Principal School 2, p. 5).
When there are too few students the money that comes through the subsidy cannot cover the school's operating expenses.That worries our bosses… from their perspective it is best to close the school and transfer students to another school; it will be cheaper to bus them.But… for the community a school closure is a loss.(Principal School 15, p. 10) In contradiction to provisions in the LQE law allowing principals greater autonomy over resources and pedagogical decisions, our participants reported working under important constraints and conflicting messages.Staffing was a critical problem for principals and teachers because end-of-year enrollment could dramatically change the teaching positions available for the following year.The lack of funding for severance pay precluded the possibility of terminating positions and teachers were moved around from one school to another independent of a principal's staffing needs (or teacher's interests).SEP funding was administered centrally, thus the efficiency promised through increased individual accountability did not materialize: Because we have a high enrollment, the Department of Education sends us all of the teachers who have been displaced from the other schools.We have to learn to deal with this.(Principal School 13, p. 117) I needed to solve a problem in the school [find a substitute teacher] and I believed that I had the autonomy to do it.I do not have much autonomy so on that matter I was mistaken.I have to send the request to the [Department of Education] and then they have to make all the arrangements.That takes a long time […] parents could claim that no one is in charge of the students.Moreover, if the superintendence showed up we could face an important fine.
(Principal School 8, p. 573) Overall, we found few examples of principals' engagement in an overt critical analysis of the policy context that had placed public schools in a precarious situation.A lack of contestation by the majority of the participants could be associated with a principal selection process that homogenizes a school leadership force aligned with the policies they are required to implement.More often we hear criticisms of the municipal Department of Education, such as the one exemplified in the previous interview excerpt.These related to tension between the principal priorities and the central office and to overt threats to school professionals engaging in active resistance: Interviewer: During the days I observed you at work, you spent quite a bit of time planning a promotional activity.How important is this activity for you?Principal: To tell you the truth, not at all […] I did it because the system makes me do that […] for me the enrollment issue is difficult because we are confronting a national, systemic problem.I feel that too much of my time, and many things that I should be leading, get lost because of [trying to increase enrollment] […].I think that if we focused on instruction, if we achieve good results, people will come, we will increase.However, when I am directly threatened, "We will fire you if you do not reach the goal", I have to get moving.Personally, it is very taxing.(Principal School 5, p. 14) Efforts by Chilean teachers and students to resist the marketization of education are a double edge sword for public schools.The long public school students' strike of 2011 contributed to lowering enrollments as well as to some policy adjustments to soften marketization.In one of the participating high schools, 600 students left during the strike to join private subsidized schools and never returned.The following quote from a principal provides a sense of the straightforward ways in which markets, metrics, and managers (Hall, 2013) jointly work to create a backlash to resistance: Teachers were calling to boycott SIMCE.I spoke with teachers and said to them: "Ok… we must be very aware that we will lose SNED [the financial incentive given to high performing school].I will join the call and my leadership team will join too, but let us not cry later when we do not get SNED" […] "I believe that there are ways to defend public education, but we will hurt our students" […].Later we had to vote on a teacher strike and we voted NO […].I went to every 10th grade class explaining SIMCE and why we had not joined the strike, why we were in favor of the social demands but why we felt [not administering SIMCE and going on strike] would hurt students.The day SIMCE was administered we had a 96% attendance among 10th graders.(Principal School 5, p. 22)

Marketing Practices
Principals in our study dedicated a considerable amount of their time to marketing their schools.Of the 228 hours of principal observations, we found that 52 hours (24% of the total) were spent on activities directly or indirectly linked to attracting and retaining students (see Table 2).There is great diversity among schools, from the principal in a comprehensive K-12 vocational school spending as much as 85% of his time during those two days of shadowing on activities related enrollment, to three principals devoting 5% of their time to this issue.In terms of the number of actions enacted to increase enrollment these represented 28% (n=198) of a total of 840 actions recorded (average of 32 actions each day, per principal).The number of actions associated with managing enrollment ranged from 38 to 3.
Table 2 summarizes five different types of activities implemented by principals to manage enrollment: redesign of the institutional image, analysis of enrollment and attendance data, networking with external organizations, establishing relationships with parents, and participating in events in the wider community.During the interviews, principals spoke at length about three of these marketing practices: redesigning the institutional image to compete against more attractive schools, networking with external organization to enrich the school offerings, and catering to parents' concerns.Developing a new image to compete against more attractive schools.The school leadership teams and faculty met to analyze enrollment data and discuss alternative strategies to recruit students.In these meetings we observed how principals stressed the importance of offering a quality education but this was not enough; the school needed to promote itself.For example, in one high school a faculty meeting was devoted to preparing a promotional activity that would take place in one of the local parks, with teachers organized into teams responsible for hosting different booths.Meanwhile, the principal worked with the municipality's Department of Education to get funding to rent amplification equipment and purchase a school banner.This example suggests that improving enrollment is understood as a school wide obligation and not only a problem for the principal to solve.Sanctions and bonuses associated with meeting targets, however, only impact principals.
A key marketing strategy entails transforming the school's institutional image and identity.This strategy addresses a concern with reputation and image that market forces have created for public and private schools in Chile.For example, some of the participating schools were busy changing their colors and students' uniform, others were creating a new logo and slogans, as well as improving the aesthetics of the building by painting or planting flowers and trees.In some schools marketing involved hiring an advertisement agency and during faculty meetings teachers evaluated consultant's proposals for an image that could be more appealing to the families.The effectiveness of these types of activities is an empirical question as in Chile we observe a decoupling of success in school`s enrollment from success in SIMCE outcomes (MacLeod and Urquiola (2009).
Observational data showed principals spend quite a bit of time working to attract new students and retain current students.Attracting students depends on the principal's ability to promote the school, to manage and present it in a positive light, and to bring back the historical reputation of public education in general and of their school in particular.In the next excerpts we exemplify how some of our participants understood the limitations of marketing as it diverted attention away from academics and from students' needs: Interviewer In this school SIMCE is not a priority.First, we need to help our students' understand the importance of learning, of how it will help them in life […].Here students write down their name on the test and get tired.It is important we understand the context of each of our students (Principal School 2, p. 9) For the market model to work, its ideology must penetrate the subjectivities of parents and students, stimulating the imagination of aspirational consumers.The private sector attracts families who see in their school choice an improvement in their position in the class relations in their neighborhood (identity differentiation).Public schools have become stigmatized, thus creating a new school image is needed to change its reputation.
I understand that it is a competition problem, because there are children who could be [attending] this school but are in a subsidized private school.I believe that the system [educational] has dismissed the public school by labeling us poor.Obviously, nobody wants to be poor.In these villages, parents believe that [if] "I'm in a private school, I will not look bad, I will not look poor".People like to compare, like competition; that is the main cause for our loss of so much funding.(Principal School 3, p. 89) Subsidized private schools sell more on image rather than on results.The other day I asked a group of parents, "What do you look for when choosing a school?"A parent answered, "Well, I see if the school is pretty".I asked "What else"?Another parent said: "If the children look orderly, if the school staff treats us well when we come".None, none said if the school has good results.So that is why we have made this change in our uniform, some people criticize us, but this will have an impact (Principal School 9, p. 393).A perception of competing against a more attractive rival fueled the implementation of different strategies to make the public school mimic the image sold by private providers.Assimilating the trappings of the product offered by private schools would appeal to parents and students as consumers.Principals could draw from concrete anecdotes that reified the consumer subjectivities through which schools and parents had come to frame their relationships.Within this logic, a clear risk of instrumentalizing students' as assets in the school's balance sheet emerges: That is why I tell you that these changes are important.For instance, the other day a mother was withdrawing her son from this school, but when the child saw the new uniform, he chose to stay.These types of changes have worked.We have had more students enrolled.Last year we had a total 44 students and this year we are now at 53.For a school like this one, each student is very valuable (Principal School 14, p. 2).Networking with external organization.Networking attempts to achieve two main, interrelated goals: access to more resources and improving the 'attractiveness' of the school through an expansion of its social capital.Businesses, on the other hand, are interested in contributing money or products as a marketing strategy linked to corporate social responsibility as well as tax breaks for philanthropy.Developing partnerships contributes to boosting-up the 'commercial image' of the school, giving it an advantage over other schools in pulling in and retaining parents.A principal's ability to secure a partnership shows his or her employer the principal´s entrepreneurial skills needed to move the school forward: When [the retail store] selected this school, people from the Department of Education came and congratulated me for my abilities.They knew that many other schools in the city had failed to obtain this partnership […].At the end of each year this store gives awards to the top graduating 8 th graders (Principal School 17, p. 28).Partnerships are identified as critical for the success of the school and a declaration of acceptance of the principal's ultimate responsibility for making the school succeed.The paradox of centralization and autonomy could be solved, according to one of our participants, by developing an entrepreneurial self that would provide more efficient solutions: That experience [a previous problem with the Department of Education] allowed me to strengthen myself, to understand that it is my responsibility alone to run this institution.I cannot count on support from the municipality.I am something in between an entrepreneur who generates his own resources and the one responsible for the goals they set for me (Principal School 6, p. 25).It is unclear if the market or tradition has entailed networking as part of the principal's role to ensure adequate transitioning from high school to the labor market or postsecondary education.We observed secondary principals in vocational-technical schools investing time developing connections with industries to find practicum placement /employment for their graduates (how many students, and where, are employed is a key selling point for this type of school).The principal in a college-bound high school spent several hours networking with university presidents and vice-presidents, seeking agreements that would allow fast tracking students' entrance to the university.This would boost a competitive advantage as, traditionally, public school students attain low college entrance examination scores thus few enter the public universities that provide government financial aid.
Catering to parents' concerns.Through the interviews, principals portrayed parents as protagonists for the school's survival.Parents' power resides in their choice to withdraw students from the school at any time and principal's imperative to retain them.In the next quotes we observe how principals validate parental choice as a strategy to mobilize school improvement, but this strategy fails to address changes that impact the quality of the learning experiences the school creates for students.
If a parent came and said, "Hey, I'm going to leave [the school] because the school is bad", it would be terrible.Teacher-student conflicts are the biggest internal threats to student retention.Principals are concerned with students' well being but they also keep in mind that unhappy parents will withdraw their pupils.We observed how principals worked at repairing or building relationships with families and students.Parents have established a strong control over teacher's work, monitoring their activities closely, with a continuous overt threat of moving the students to another school: It was 8:15 and she [the teacher] was not in the classroom and we start classes at 8:10.These parents were looking and aware she was late.So, I went to her classroom and asked the students about her, they told me "the teacher is not around".So I started the class myself, concerned about what parents may say […].We could receive a fine from the Superintendence […].Later, I had to reprehend that teacher (Principal School 8, p. 392).The excerpt exemplifies that parents are holding professionals more accountable.While this may benefit children, it also runs the risk of eroding professional autonomy when accountability works from a logic of distrust (as opposed to accounting to others the extent to which one delivered what one promised).Parents' empowerment is one of the dilemmas of the new professionalism, placing the principal in a difficult position.Our participants found themselves between parents' control and teachers' concerns with maintaining their authority and autonomy.
In an effort to give parents/students reasons to choose their school, principals added services such as free transportation to and from school and offered recreational activities for students and parents.Students were provided with additional co-curricular activities, such a cheerleading squad and a dance group that performed in activities organized by the municipal government, thus making the "new" school visible.These kinds of activities involve expenditures that may report educational benefits to participants, but are limited to few, selected students.
Parents, positioning themselves as consumers, would either go or threaten to go to the Education Superintendence office to file a formal complaint, which then required principals to spend time responding to the complaint by conducting internal investigations.In one of the schools, in which teachers were in overt conflict with the new principal, the same parent had filed 9 complaints with the Superintendence.In another school, on one of the days we shadowed the principal, she came in at 10 am (entry time is 8 am) because she had been giving an affidavit for an investigation due to a parent's complaint of a teacher's alleged mistreatment of a student.Her report, the principal told the researcher, expressed her own concerns about this teacher's relationship with students.These practices exemplify the erosion of trust other authors have described as a consequences of the adoption of managerialism in the public service sector (Maxcy, 2009).They also exemplify a dilemma within a critique of new professionalism, as one must reflect on the appropriate balance between an empowered parent/student and professional autonomy.Making sure teachers arrive on time to class is important but one must wonder why not all teachers at that school had adopted that practice?

Discussion
Although participating principals understood the complexity of issues that had caused families' flight from public schools, they also accepted personal responsibility for addressing this situation in their schools.Through the rigorous selection process, we hypothesize that candidates who have already adopted managerial subjectivities apply and are later hired, further reifying the school governance model advanced by NPM.In our observations as well as in principals' accounts of how enrollment targets played out in their daily work we observe the enactment of the "new professionalism" advocated by NPM.Following Evetts (2011), in the pursuit of enrollment targets the self-interest of the municipal government (employer) appeared to prevail over principals' interest in the academic program required to lift public education and families' interest in a quality education for their children.This shift in priorities exemplifies why and how education understood as a commodity undermines the ideal of education as a social right.Heeding the priorities of the municipality creates tensions among participating principals when they believe that the solution to enrollment declines is long-term and involves more attention to real improvements in educational opportunities than to marketing.This exemplifies what Evetts (2011) discusses as the unintended consequences, distraction from the professional´s core mission, of the imposition of targets by a managerialist version of professionalism.
The performance agreement used by educational law in Chile to judge the quality of principals exemplifies the technology of performativity through which complex social processes, such an inequitable educational system and choice in our case, are translated into a regime of numbers to hold individuals accountable (Ball, 2003).The enrollment performance target effectively served to control principals' work.What is striking in the data presented in this paper is how principals' enrollment efforts must be geared toward managing threats they receive from various stakeholders.The municipal Department of Education threatens to fire the principal and threatens school closure if enrollment targets are not attained.Parents dissatisfied with the school threaten principals with withdrawing their pupil or with filing a complaint with the Superintendence.The State, via the Superintendence of Education, threatens the school with fines if the it violates a legal provision.Targets, to the extent that they are linked to external rewards, threaten the possibility of teachers' resistance as financial benefits and autonomy are jeopardized.In the midst of these threat-based relations the principal is expected to overcome the legacy of over 30 years of educational policies designed to weaken the public school he or she has agreed to lead.
Principals, some willingly and some reluctantly, became entrepreneurs seeking to attract resources (students who bring the voucher and partnerships) in what they described as a competitive school marketplace.Marketing was the key approach principals deployed to meet their employer's requirement (and need) for increased enrollment.Through marketing they sought to convince parents that under the principal´s leadership the school had change and it was now amenable to serving parents' desires.Marketing involved attempts to model the public school after the services provided by the private schools, thus catering to the interests of consumers (parents).
The efficiency and effectiveness of marketing strategies to boost enrollment in low performing, stigmatized public schools are dubious and place principals and their schools as active contributors to sustaining the very system that has undermined public education.As the marketing strategies of private providers are better funded, as they are asked to compete on an unequal level field, as public schools have become stigmatized, meeting goals (SIMCE and enrollment) is not enough to turn the wave eroding citizens' trust in public education.Efforts to improve SIMCE scores are of little relevance when parents' choices are based on another set of consumer values (Weinstein et al., 2012) and the reputation of public education will not be change by individual principals.As pointed out by Linkow et al. (2011), marketing fails to address the promise of choice, that is, the provision of a stronger educational program.Moreover, time spent on promotional activities prevent principals from giving attention to instructional matters that could directly impact students' learning.
Principals reported much less autonomy than promised by the law.Rather than autonomy they expressed abandonment by their municipality's Department of Education.It seems that autonomy, in these public schools, is autonomy to develop the kind of entrepreneurship needed to beat other schools at obtaining sponsorships and partnerships from business and other organizations.Creating conditions to compete with other public schools for monies from the private sector perpetuates the idea that success reflects personal merits.Saving one school involves sinking another one within the municipality when the number of families "choosing" public schools is low.Competition has additional consequences as it undermines the possibilities for system-wide school improvement.
A clear consequence of this environment of targets and threats is an erosion of the relationships of trust between practitioners/clients, practitioner and employers, and among practitioners that in the past has characterized professionalism (Biesta, 2004;Evetts, 2011).Social relations based on measurements, inspections and extrinsic incentives have come to replace trust, thus moving schools away from what the literature reiterates about leading for improvement (Leithwood, Day, Sammons, Harris, & Hopkins, 2006;Tan, 2012).Rather than spending time promoting events to make their "new" schools visible (advertisement), principals need to spend time working with the school community to develop a shared vision (as opposed to image).Principals need to spend time working collaboratively with teachers, parents and peer schools to support students, teachers, and organizational learning (Day et al., 2010).Time spent on marketing is time not spent on what matters for improving the education public schools offer, that is, building internal capacity for research, reflection, and innovation (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2012).
Our findings exemplify some of the problems of the "new professionalism" fashioned by educational laws seeking to steer the work of school leaders in the competitive school marketplace.To avoid proposing individual solutions to address structural problems, the agency of public school principals to change this model should not be overstated.From the safety of the academy, it is irresponsible for us to suggest that principals jeopardize their jobs by engaging in active resistance or by ignoring performance targets.The various educational policies controlling principals' work offer enough disjuncture to allow spaces for agency and negotiating priorities.For example, fulfilling the SEP Law requirements can offer principals leverage to spend more time focusing on instructional matters.School principals, and the professional development programs that prepare them, need to help them learn to work from an ethic of solidarity, developing and implementing strategies for sharing resources among schools.For example, they could jointly hire a bus to take children to and from school or seek partnerships with business that benefit all schools within the municipality.
In professional development and principal preparation programs, principals can learn how to develop and implement democratic forms of accountability to make possible social relationships that resist the distrust promoted by the marketization of education.As argued by Ryan (2005), the problem is not accountability per se.These findings highlight why questions such as "for what" and to "whom" should principals be accountable, need to be explore in principal preparation programs and policy development.On a similar point, Anderson (2011) has argued that school leaders and teachers need to be responsible for advancing a human rights agenda, and education as a social right.
One interesting contradiction emerges from the fact that the market logic has displaced students as the "clients" of the "new professionals", replacing them with parents as consumers.Chilean students attending public institutions have not entered into this economic relation with their school or the state.Instead, they have mobilized extensively to hold the government directly responsible for the erosion of public education.The high school and university student movements of 2006 and 2011 have catalyzed changes in educational policies but not in the model.
During her candidacy for Chile`s presidency in 2013, Michelle Bachelet ran on a platform promising to dismantle key features of the market model for the provision of educational services.During her first year she has sent a number of bills to the legislature seeking, among other things, to stop parents' co-payment in addition to state subsidy, to turn all private subsidized schools into nonprofit corporations, and to stop all state-financed schools from selecting students.It is too soon to tell if the laws that have been passed will make a difference to strengthen public education or will increase competition between public and private schools.
Dr. Leiva is an Associated Professor in the School of Pedagogy, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile.Recent co-authored publications include: Terms of institutional development in schools in Chile (Redie, 2014); Reflections on the school's role in inter-ethnical relations from Chilean state ethnopolicies (Actualidades Investigativas en Educación, 2014); and Self-diagnosis of situations and needs for educational counseling of schools in the Fifth Region of Valparaiso (Páginas de Educación, gary.anderson@nyu.eduGary L. Anderson is a professor of Educational Leadership in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.A former high school teacher and principal, he has published on topics such as educational policy and leadership, critical ethnography, action research, and school micro-politics.His most recent books include: The Action Research Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty (2015, Sage), with Kathryn Herr, and Advocacy Leadership: Toward a Post-Reform Agenda (2009, Routledge).Kathryn Herr Montclair State University herrk@mail.montclair.eduKathryn Herr is a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations in the College of Education and Human Services at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ.She currently primarily teaches qualitative and action research.Recent publications include The Action Research Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty, (2015, Sage), with co-author, Gary Anderson.
Selected Goals and Indicators for a Performance Agreement Contract Signed by a Newly Hired School Principal Adapted from http://www.directoresparachile observations to assess and develop teaching capacities).The Superintendence of Education monitors the implementation of SEP's legal requirements, sanctioning schools if these are not met.

Table 1
Characteristics of the Schools Lead by Participating Principals* Schools ID 1-13 participated in Study 1; schools ID 14-19 participated in Study 2. Source: Ministry of Education Center for Study.To protect anonymity, data reported as range.IVE indicates the proportion of priority students.SEP school classification: Autonomous schools consistently demonstrated high achievement on measurements administered by the Ministry of Education; Emergent schools had average or below average performance, too few students to draw inferences, or operated two years or less; Recuperation schools consistently had poor performance or had not submitted an improvement plan in the timeframe required.

Table 2
Enrollment Management Practices Observed through Work Shadowing ofPrincipals (n=13) So we have to keep working on that, keep the population here, the enrollment and make it a stable enrollment[…].This year I have 182 students and I will start 2015 with 182[…].Our task now is to let everybody know all the things that we are doing in the school.(PrincipalSchool 8, p. 157) For many years the school was stagnant [in terms of enrollment].Parents' petitions were not addressed […] they wanted new uniforms, we gave them new uniforms; they wanted the school painted, now the school is painted; they wanted better treatment from the staff, now the treatment is different.(PrincipalSchool 12, p. 201)