Putting bureaucratic accountability into a perspective in terms of academic achievement Dilek Pekince Kardaş 1 Received: 29 November 2018 /Accepted: 29 July 2019/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract This research aims to understand the perceptions of a group of secondary school teachers and principals regarding the place of academic achievement within the bureaucratic accountability structure. The research focus is, from the educators’ per- spectives, to what extent the Ministry of National Education holds them and their schools accountable for academic achievement. The data were obtained from semi- structured interviews with a group of 30 teachers and school principals from seven secondary schools. The schools are distinguished by their distinctive features in the Turkish education system, which stands out with its bureaucratic character. The findings indicate that the accountability relationship between the upper hierarchical units of the country’ s education system and the schools is perceived to be quite weak or even uncertain in terms of academic achievement. The educators seem to think that there is no expectation of achievement and they rigorously criticize existing expecta- tions. They claim that because their achievement status is not monitored, they do not encounter any intervention or sanction in cases of failure. The findings provide a critical perspective of the costs of bureaucratic accountability as well as a query on the ideal type of bureaucracy in practice. Keywords Bureaucratic accountability . Academic achievement . Turkish education system 1 Introduction Researchers have called ours the “age of accountability” (Hopmann 2008). They argue that accountability has spread through political replication among countries, in a kind of global epidemic (Moller 2009). The fact that accountability is referred to as an aspect of Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-019-09304-9 * Dilek Pekince Kardaş ecnikep@hotmail.com; d.kardas@alparslan.edu.tr 1 Department of Educational Sciences, Muş Alparslan University, Faculty of Education, Muş, Turkey