| Summary: | When the new public management is influencing the schooling system, many countries choose to renew their management tools to make various aspects of schooling commensurable and comparable (Desrosières, 2008). This article shows specific results of a broader research on the implementation of Results Based Management (RBM) policy in the province of Quebec (Canada) schooling system. The analysis we are showcasing here is about how planning, contracting and monitoring tools are implemented and enacted at the secondary school level. Beyond the technical surface of the tools, we analyse the ongoing institutional change at stake, using concepts as apparatus (dispositif), regulation (in a broad sense) and test (Boltanski, 2009). Two distinct but articulated regulation apparatus tend to change the school's formal rules, cognitive framework and normative framework (Scott, 1995). The first apparatus is based on monitoring tools and seek to regulate the pedagogical work of the teachers. It calls upon ‘reality tests’ to assess the ‘worth’ of the teacher's actions within the scope of an ‘industrial’ order of worth. The second apparatus is based on contractual tools and promotes a formal rationality (Weber). This apparatus rests on several ‘tests of truths’ contributing to an official definition of the institution's identity as a "collective search for performance and ongoing improvement.” More and more, this is becoming an institutional myth. Our methodology is based on semi-structured interviews with school’s principals (n = 7) and teachers (n = 18) in three secondary schools and on the content analysis of the management tools implemented in those schools.
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