Om det förändrade ansvaret för skolan vägen till mål- och resultatstyrning och några av dess konsekvenser

Sammanfattning: (On the shift of responsibility for compulsory schooling. The path to management by objectives and results and some of its consequences).The aim with this thesis is to contribute to the discussion about the responsibility for compulsory schooling in the 1990s. The decade began with a shift of responsibility for the compulsory school, a process generally referred to as 'municipalization', which on an everyday basis makes it perfectly clear where the responsibility lies. This thesis probes a little further into the problems of the distribution of responsibility, through investigating how the issue of responsibility for the nine-year comprehensive compulsory school has been discussed and motivated over time, in order to analyse more precisely the conditions at hand as the municipalities were to take over responsibility for the different schools in the 1990s. As a sequel to the fundamental direction of this study it enters into a discussion about the consequences following the distribution of responsibility: the effects of management by objectives and results on the school's cognitive approach and problematizing the issue of power and influence under the new model of responsibility.The thesis contains an analysis of how the issue of responsibility for compulsory schooling has been discussed in official commission reports over time, with the purpose of gaining a better understanding of the compulsory school in the 1990s, and its conditions. The historical study thus focuses on the school reform conducted in the early 90s and the three concepts seen as central to the discussion about responsibility for the compulsory school towards the end of the twentieth century: municipalization, decentralization and turning the school into a goals and achievement-related organisation. The analysis is founded upon an outlook based on discourse, aiming to distinguish any changes in the meaning of those three key expressions as well as to define shifts and discursive breaks in textual references to the responsibility for comprehensive school.