Audit Culture and the Making of a “Gypsy School”: Financing Policies, Curricula, Testing and Educational Inequalities in a Romanian Town

The aim of this paper is to understand how sophisticatedly linked factors are responsible for the making of a “Gypsy school” with low educational performance and bad fame in a Romanian town. In doing so, the notion of audit culture is introduced, understood as a set of culturally mediated norms and practices of ranking. As this approach comes into sight, despite the commitment shown by the Romanian policy-makers to increase school integration of the Roma, a series of regulations – accepted or overlooked by them – unwittingly obstruct this aim. The framing of national financing policies may involuntarily lead to tracking the Roma children into certain schools, where – in lack of a variety of teaching materials, refined testing and a clear system of rewarding the teacher’s performance – quality education becomes a hard-to-reach target. The contextuality of the bad label of a “Gypsy school” is also relevant in this research as it may act either as a resource, or as a stigma on different situations. Audit culture, too, highlights what contexts engender its negative aspects.

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