School systems are shifting towards forms of post-bureaucratic governance
(PBG), implying higher levels of school autonomy, choice, and performancebased
management. Under this governance approach, which combines forms of
administrative and market accountability, schools face greater levels of
competition and external pressure to perform. Schools experience such pressures
unevenly and address them through different responses. The paper develops a
mixed-methods case study conducted in Madrid, a Spanish region where PBG
reform has intensified in the last decades, and proposes a novel index to position
schools within their reference local education markets. The results show that
schools articulate a broad range of logics of action, largely interrelated with their
position in the education marketplace. We also show that schools’ responses to
external pressures are dynamic and marked by tensions of a different nature,
which schools need to navigate, often without sufficient support from public
authorities.