Teacher Retention in an Age of Performative Accountability

Target Culture and the Discourse of Disappointment

Jane Perryman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

In this insightful and timely volume, Jane Perryman provides a definitive analysis of the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention through a critique of the culture of performative accountability in education, bringing together theory, literature, and empirical data.

Drawing on data across several long-term research projects and through a Foucauldian theoretical framework, Perryman argues that teachers' working lives, both in the UK and internationally, are being increasingly affected by the rise in the neoliberal performativity and accountability culture in schools. Teachers' work is increasingly directed towards assessment, exams, progress measures, and preparation for review and inspection, and drawn away from the more individualistic and creative aspects of the job. This culture of hyper accountability and super-performativity, Perryman argues, has created a 'discourse of disappointment' – where the hopes and aspirations of teachers are crushed beneath the performative pressures under which they work.

Teacher Retention in an Age of Performative Accountability offers a convincing, compellingly written critical analysis of how the values, purposes and practices embedded in education affect the working experience of teachers over time. Perryman makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the effects of accountability and performativity mechanisms in schools and offers insight into why so many teachers leave the profession. This analysis is important to scholars, educators, and policymakers alike.

1 The intensification of accountability

DOI: 10.4324/9780429344121-2

Introduction

Imagine a world where teachers are trusted, where it is assumed that they came into teaching for the right reasons – wanting to work with children, love of their subject, for example – and they would not deliberately harm their students’ progress through disinterest, incompetence or laziness. What if they could decide what and when to teach, how and if to assess? What if their time was spent on creative and imaginative lesson planning, and giving useful and inspiring feedback, rather than preparing for inspection, filling forms, ticking boxes and running on accountability’s treadmill? But no. The dominant discourse in education is that Accountability is A Good Thing; despite evidence, as discussed in the introduction, that this culture directly leads to teachers losing their professional selves and many leaving the profession. Research also shows it is not necessarily good for students either, as they see their education rationed (Gillborn and Youdell 2000; Au 2008), are served a bland diet of similarly presented lessons which aim to teach to the test (Popham 2001) and are made anxious by the pressure of high-stakes testing and their accompanying intervention strategies (Athanasou 2010).

This chapter examines what accountability means and the reasons for its global rise. It discusses international accountability practices, before specifically tracing the increasing system of accountability in which teachers in England have worked since the 1988 Education Reform Act. It explains how the policy explosion of the last 40 years has been made possible because the accepted discourse presented by government and the media is that teachers are in need of reform, and this reform needs to be monitored by increased surveillance, achieved through making them accountable. Finally, it traces the growth of accountability through data I have collected over the last two decades to illustrate the intensification of accountability I have witnessed.

Accountability and the neoliberal paradox

Poulson (1998: 420) argued, ‘few people would disagree that increased accountability is a good thing; or that standards in schools should be raised…however accountability is an ambiguous term in discourses about education; within it are condensed a range of meanings and emotions’.

Accountability can be defined as the way in which teachers and schools are accountable to outside forces (such as government, education authorities, parents and school governors). So far, so straightforward. However, Holloway et al. (2017: 3) describe the complexity of accountability as follows:

the accountability term remains ambiguous and multifaceted, with policy actors employing various and often implicit definitions of accountability, its elements and its limits. Overall, accountability is a concept with multiple meanings, and a policy programme that covers a broad range of policy options and models including political, legal, bureaucratic, or market forms of accountability.

For some scholars, accountability is ‘the most advocated and least analysed’ notion (Burke 2005: 1). Therein lies the problem. Seemingly, accountability is so accepted that it is rarely questioned. Even those writing about its detrimental effects, such as Poulson above, have to start with a tentative ‘of course accountability is a good thing, but…’

Lingard et al. (2017) name four aspects of accountability – consumer, contract, performative and corporate. Most pertinently for this book is the notion of performative accountability, which ‘affects what is believed to count, and what gets counted, in schools, as well as how teachers and school leaders are held to account’ (2017: 11). They (2017: 13) go on to claim

while it can be argued that accountability was initially only a part of school systems, the neoliberal framing of accountability and the move to an audit culture has seen performative accountability transformed to become, arguably, the system itself

They give the example of the Labour government establishing national literacy and numeracy testing in Australia for all schools. Results are published in league tables similar to those used in England and are a ‘classic example of an information-based policy instrument’ (ibid).

Dunnick (2006) also uses this notion of performative accountability. He discusses what he calls ‘orders of accountability’ and analyses four specific orders of accountability which are; performative, regulatory, managerial and embedded. He associates performative accountability with ‘direct and explicit acts of account giving’. We shall see in the discussion to follow how this manifests in schools through regimes of accountable activities which are designed to demonstrate efficiency. Regulatory accountability involves the ‘control of conduct’ and involves judgements of how well codes, guidance and accountability standards are followed. This is usually achieved formally through inspection regimes, but informally in observations and monitoring. Managerial accountability creates the environment in which this monitoring can take place using sanction and rewards. Embedded accountability occurs when norms and behaviours about accountability have been internalised and linked to professional identity and a sense of responsibility. The idea that notions of accountability have been internalised takes us some way in our understanding of how accountability is so widely accepted.

The acceptance and international growth of accountability is inextricably linked to the neoliberal context. Olssen (2015) argues that whilst classic liberalism has a central tenet of distrust of state control and power, with free individualism to the fore,

neoliberalism has come to represent a positive conception of the state’s role in creating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. Whereas in classical liberalism the individual is characterised as having an autonomous human nature and can practice freedom, in neoliberalism the state seeks to create an individual that is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur

(2015: 130)

Similarly, Robertson (2007) traces the roots of neoliberalism to the utopian kind of liberalism described by philosophers (particularly Locke and Hobbes, for example), centring on ideals such as individualism and personal freedom. However, neoliberalism supplements this freedom with the notion of the market, so that the individual’s freedom becomes subject to market forces, and this is seen as the route to full economic development. She argues that in education this led to the economy, and the market, being prioritised at the expense of what might have been previously seen as core educational values. Hence:

Education systems were mandated to develop efficient, creative and problem-solving learners and workers for a globally-competitive economy, while teachers were to demonstrate that they had had taught their young charges through national (SATS) and global (e.g. PISA, TIMMS) systems which demonstrated ‘added value’

(Robertson 2007: 11)

Suspitsyna (2010: 571) argues that this audit culture in education creates a neoliberal paradox – ‘on the one hand, neoliberalism is founded on the idea of entrepreneurialism and a reduced role of the state … on the other hand, the implementation of accountability measures…depends on a greater state involvement in educational affairs’. Similarly, Hursh (2005: 5) outlines several contradictions inherent in neoliberal policies. There is obviously a disparity between the idea that the markets self-regulate, and the increased need to monitor performance:

Neo-liberal governments, therefore, desire to reduce funding for education while at the same time reorganizing education to fit the needs of the economy. Because the public might object to cuts in social spending and increasing economic inequality, neo-liberal policy makers have skillfully packaged the reforms to make it appear that they are promoting equality

The rise in accountability has its roots in the 1960s, when the pressures of global competition caused many countries to become concerned about the performance of their education system, believing that a skilled workforce was essential in the race for global dominance. From the 1960s onwards, there was a strong belief that modern economies, with their dependence on modern technologies needed an educated, skilled and knowledgeable workforce. Vaizey, an academic economist, wrote ‘we live in a time when knowledge is exploding. More knowledge, new techniques, and new abilities have to be given to more and more people because of this fact’ (Vaizey in Morley and Rassool 1999: 19). This became linked with the need to consider the efficient use of teachers, raising productivity, reducing wastage and other industrial metaphors. Thus ‘two significant strands, namely economy and cost-effectiveness, were now emerging to define the nature of a centrally planned, and managed process of educational change’ (Morley and Rassool 1999: 20). One powerful lever for change is PISA performance as ‘poor comparative performance creates a ‘policy window’ through which ideas, which previously seemed extreme or outlandish, can enter national policy discourses and attract attention and support. In turn, these new policy ideas can legitimate new policy voices’ (Ball 2013: 3).

Sobe (2014) argues that accountability is not a by-product of global education policy, but rather a formulator of it. He uses work by Bruno Latour (1987) who makes a distinction between diffusion (passing policy along) and translation (conducting policy). Because of the unpredictability of translation, policy makers adopt what Latour calls ‘black boxing’, making documents and guidance so tightly worded and impossible to misinterpret that ‘smooth borrowing’ is guaranteed. Thus ‘auditing/accountability practices are not simply passive acts of observation. They shape standards of performance, and beyond this they construct the very contexts in which they operate’ (Sobe 2014: 143).

The spread of accountability is indeed global. Suspitsyna (2010: 567) declares ‘for more than a decade, quality assurance and accountability have reigned over education policy agendas on a vast geographic territory’. Holloway et al. (2017: 6) concur

While carried out in various ways and to various degrees around the world, a heightened focus on student testing is nevertheless a global phenomenon, as major transnational agencies such as the OECD, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the World Bank have invigorated a global interest in school performance measures that rely on standardized tests to measure, evaluate, and compare national and subnational education systems

Teltemann and Jude (2019) conducted a survey of assessment and accountability practices using data from the OECD PISA study – a comparison of six school-level questionnaires from 2000 to 2015. They found four distinct clusters, spread geographically, with varying accountability practices:

1. Seven ‘diverse countries’ which have ‘comprehensive evaluation and accountability measures’, but less rigorous/formal external standards and control mechanisms.
2. UK and USA – characterised by marketisation, decentralisation and an established tradition of standards, and control.
3. ‘The continental welfare states’ plus Finland, Italy and Greece. These are characterised by their strength on internal evaluation but little else, though accountability measures continue to increase. For example, ‘in Austria, Switzerland and Germany, the publication of TIMSS 1997 and PISA 2000 results was followed by thorough educational reforms’ (ibid: 267).
4. Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Luxembourg, where there is ‘stricter control in terms of external standards’.

Though the clusters exhibited different approaches to assessment and accountability, they concluded that throughout the clusters assessment practices (both top-down and peer-driven) ‘increased over time, reflecting an increased pressure on education systems to raise quality and efficiency’ (Teltemann and Jude 2019: 268).

As an example of major accountability reform; in the USA a key legislation was the No Child Left Behind Act 2002 (NCLB), which Redden and Low (2012: 37) describe as

internationally the most famous neoliberal educational reform framework…which obliged individual states in the United Sta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The intensification of accountability
• 2 Performativity, governmentality and the teacher self
• 3 Performative accountability: The case of inspection
• 4 The emotions of teaching
• 5 A crisis in retention
• 6 Conclusion: Time for a change?
• Index