Education, Professionalism, and the Quest for Accountability

Hitting the Target but Missing the Point

Jane Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136837203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

This book focuses on education and its relation to professional accountability as viewed from two different, but not unrelated, perspectives. First, the book is about the work of professionals in schools and colleges (teachers, head teachers, leaders, principals, directors and educational managers, etc.) and the detrimental effects which our present system of accountability – and the managerialism which this system creates – have had on education, its practice, its organization, its conduct and its content. It is also about the professional education (the occupational/professional formation and development) of practitioners in communities other than educational ones and how they, too, contend with the effects of this system on their practices.

These different perspectives represent two sides of the same problem: that whatever one's métier – whether a teacher, nurse, social worker, community officer, librarian, civil servant, etc – all who now work in institutions designed to serve the public are expected to reorganize their thoughts and practice in accordance with a "performance" management model of accountability which encourages a rigid bureaucracy, one which translates regulation and monitoring procedures, guidelines and advice into inflexible and obligatory compliance. A careful scrutiny of the underlying rationale of this "managerial" model shows how and why it may be expected, paradoxically, to make practices less accountable – and, in the case of education, less educative.

Part I
Starting-Points

Ideas, Ideals, and Ideologies

1
From Concern to Doubt, From Doubt to Critique

[I]n philosophy, the first difficulty is to see the problem is difficult … [W]hen our inquiry is finished … we shall have come to see a complicated structure where we thought everything was simple … we shall have become aware of the penumbra of uncertainty surrounding the situations which inspire no doubt … we shall find doubt more frequently justified than we supposed …

Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1980 [1950]: 11)

1.1 INTRODUCING THE CRITIC OF, AND THE APOLOGIST FOR, THE STATUS QUO

How might expressions of concern about the way present public accountability policies play out in practice—in particular, those which impinge on matters that relate to education—acquire the necessary ‘normative grip’¹ to be recognized as well-founded, legitimate criticisms of the status quo?

I ask this question because an apologist for the status quo (henceforth: ‘the apologist’) may dismiss the criticisms offered by a critic of the status quo (henceforth: ‘the critic’) as merely personal prejudice, unwarranted expressions of dissatisfaction, or else as Luddite worries about change and modernization. In the absence of an independent, neutral, epistemological vantage point from which the perspectives of both critic and apologist may be judged, how do we distinguish a mere complaint or grumble from justified criticism of the status quo? This is the subject of this chapter—how we adjudicate between two opposing view points of the status quo.

In the Introduction to this book, I referred to the many critiques of present accountability practices available in the literature. But consider now the following critical utterances, sourced from a wide cross-section of people² who express real disquiet about the way present accountability practices impinge on education:

(i) “I went in to teaching for the same reason as I joined the police— community service. I enjoy working with young people, and still do, but … [i]n the past seven years I haven’t seen anything get better. I have seen funding cut, my school struggling from one financial crisis to the next, and the Government spending millions of pounds on this or that strategy … ” (secondary teacher)

(ii) “The demand, especially the paperwork is taking too much time … unnecessary amount of recording and processing … everything relating to assessments distracts my focus from other things …” (primary teacher)

(iii) “ … so much about teaching is about relationships … and what sorts of things can you measure? By and large, things that don’t matter.” (special needs teacher)

(iv) “[Institutional] Autonomy brings you freedom on the one hand, but you could end up losing it on the other, because the government starts throwing targets at you.” (college principal)

(v) “ … excessive bureaucracy, ridiculous deadlines and unconvincing consultation processes keep duplicating with each new initiative … Heads are asked to do far too much where the interest of the child is not the primary motive … more and more targets … the DfES does not need heads like me. They need a … compliant … group of heads who will … think within the parameters they are allowed.” (head teacher)

(vi) “Something is clearly going wrong when many deputies with more than five years’ experience simply don’t want to apply for headship.” (governor of a primary school)

(vii) “I feel the role of the head … is too vast, too pressurised … emotionally and professionally … Too much is about Sats, ticking boxes, finding evidence and the endless, often pointless, paperwork. That conflicts with doing what is right for the children.” (deputy head teacher)

(viii) “I have a vice-principal whose main duty is to prepare for inspections, and another teacher who spends four days out of five collecting data for quality assurance, and therefore only teaches the equivalent of one day a week. That is two people away from where they should be, supporting students and teachers. Yet quality comes from teachers in classrooms … When I came into the job I was involved with students every day. Now I spend most of my time dealing with documents and spreadsheets.” (college principal)

(ix) “We as parents want to know our children are improving but we would like less emphasis on targets. There is concern among parents that we are spending too much time [on] tests … and education is suffering as a result.” (spokesperson for the National Confederation of Parent-Teacher Associations)

(x) “ … to cultivate enthusiasm for literature … that does need time. Reading is more than a skill, it’s a companion for life. If there is too much targeting and testing, you kill the purpose of exercise … the people who want to test subjects like English … don’t really understand them … so there’s an attempt to turn them into something that can be measured.” (author)

These are not voices of the academy, offering well-researched, scholarly critique of the status quo. They are voices of those actively engaged in schooling, or else in activities closely related to education. The overall impression given is that the present system of public accountability marginalizes or deforms important aims, values, and ideals of education. Such views, let us say, represent the concerns of the critic of the status quo. In the critical concerns listed we may detect demoralization, puzzlement, exasperation, resignation, alienation—but mostly, I suggest, frustration— frustration that nothing at all countervails against the dominant canon of what passes now for public accountability.

In confrontation with the critic stands the apologist for the status quo. Unlike the critic, the apologist sees the various ‘managerial’ modes of governance imported into the public sector from the private sector and run in accordance with principles and practices of ‘New Public Management’ (see Introduction, Section I.5), as having successfully reformed the way in which public accountability is understood and public service institutions, such as education, are managed.

What is the philosophically interesting story that spans these two viewpoints—deformation, on the one hand, and reformation, on the other? How do we decide between these two opposing positions?

The apologist has management theory. The critic has anxieties: how to express concerns without being seen as an opponent of change, or as against the idea of accountability per se. One of our tasks will be to transform the critic’s anxieties and concerns into a justifiable stance of critique—concerning the worth or legitimacy of our present public accountability system.

So what does the critic have to say? It is the critic’s opinion that the system of accountability now operational not only compromises teaching practice but also worsens the educational experience of students. We should take it seriously how many of those quoted previously express the thought that some of the things which ‘matter’ in teaching cannot be measured or set as targets. Above all, the critic is at odds with a ‘performance’ culture in which only measurable returns are valued.

The critic wants to appeal to something beyond this culture. But no ‘professional sub-culture’ (Sockett 1990: 248) is permitted to stand apart from managerial rationality, whether in the domains of administration, research, admissions, assessment, teaching, or student learning. So far as education is concerned, values drawn from business and management theory now permeate the rational planning of all educational institutions, as determiners of standards, pedagogy, and curricula (Marshall 1999: 152). For the critic, there is a further problem to consider. The dominant paradigm of practical rationality now operational also defines public rationality. So dominant has an ethos of managerialism become throughout the public sector that not just educational institutions, but hospitals, medical centers, social service offices, police stations, fire stations, prisons—all those institutions we refer to as public institutions—now have to comply with managerial rationalities.

Some critics (e.g., Standish 2001: 514; Elliott 2001: 207) describe the status quo as ‘totalising’—precisely because it is so difficult to find any space beyond the managerial technologies of audit and the discourses of marketization to generate an alternative vision to the kind of public rationality that now characterizes industrialized, ‘advanced’ (Rose 1996) liberal democracies.³ So the critic who seeks to fight the presumptions of the present educational culture has a daunting task. To criticize managerial accountability is to question the legitimacy of the political, as well as the educational, status quo.

What does the apologist want to say here? Are the concerns expressed in the quotations I cited earlier to be dismissed as mere complaints? Will the apologist say the critic harbors unreasonable fears about modernization and change, or even a nostalgic desire to return to an imagined ‘golden age’ status quo ante?

Well, how much Luddism or nostalgia can one detect in those voices? I do not detect either of these things, myself. But suppose that I am wrong and the apologist is right. Then the apologist, being an apologist, ought to be able to provide positive evidence to support the status quo. What is this evidence? ‘Criterial’ indicators of ‘performance’ and ‘quality assurance’ will be offered as acceptable government ‘benchmarks’ for standards in education. But don’t these beg the question?

So we arrive at an impasse. Whereas the critic sees present education accountability policies as impeding educational practices and narrowing the educational experience of pupils/students,⁴ the apologist, in contrast, sees those policies as creating a ‘transparent’ public accountability framework in which ‘good teachers’⁵ are rewarded and incompetent ones identified as ‘failing’ teachers. Note the ‘elation’ reported by Woods et al. (1997: 133) of one head teacher, interviewed after a ‘successful’ school Ofsted inspection. Here is someone who clearly responds well to the ‘performative’ culture: “I’m thrilled! … what a sense of relief it was to know we’re all going in the right direction … I am doing my job … I feel I can manage it.” As Gerald Grace (1995: 23) notes, there exist many head teachers who are drawn by the image of managing director.

One thing is clear. Two different value-frameworks are now at war with one another, each working to different conceptions of public accountability and professionalism. The dialectical difference between the two positions has been summed up in the following way:

The new public management has been seen by critics as a market-based ideology invading public sector organizations … But it has also been seen by others … as a management hybrid with a continuing emphasis on core public service values, albeit expressed in a new way. (Ferlie et al. 1996: 9)

In later chapters we shall see that the argument between the critic and apologist touches on other matters besides the role which the market plays in the organization of public service institutions. Among one of the main concerns the critic has, is the institutionalization of a managerial practical rationality, now operational within educational practices and which prioritizes budget, audit, and productivity considerations in strategic decision-making. How much room will there be within this organizational framework for ethical and educational values to inform choices? Such values will become invisible—or so the critic fears.

The thing we begin to see emerging here is a conflict between two completely different outlooks which, in one way and another, will occupy us over many chapters:

(i) It is of over-riding importance, within the present conception of public accountability, for managers to have the decisional power over all those who work in organizational practices.

(ii) If one is to function as a moral agent in practical contexts one does not abdicate or delegate to others one’s decision-making powers.⁶

Of course, it is somewhat artificial to reduce all the possible kinds of criticisms of the status quo to what ‘the critic’ believes, and equally artificial to pit ‘the critic’s’ views against those of ‘the apologist’—as if there were no points of agreement between them.⁷ But my purpose here is to concentrate on broad general questions to do with professionalism and accountability as these two concepts are now understood in educational contexts. In what follows, ‘the critic’ will give the anti-managerial viewpoint, whereas ‘the apologist’ will give the managerialist’s in a version that embraces principles of NPM.

How to advance from here? First, surely we need to say some more about the ver...

Table of contents

• Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Starting-Points
• Part II Practical Judgment
• Part III End-Points
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index