Work in progress – please do not quote without permission of the authors Fab-Q M5-1final
ECER Symposium Göteborg 2008
Fabricating Quality in European Education: Teacher Professionalism, Quality Assurance Regimes and Performance: a comparative study
Teacher Professionalism, QAE and Performativity: issues for debate
Jenny Ozga and a panel from the FAB-Q Team
Introduction
This paper is an attempt to pull the threads of the symposium together and to offer topics for further discussion. The project intentions in conducting the survey were to:
(a) explore how teachers experience the implementation of QAE in the different systems;
(b) find out how QAE affects teachers and pupils in their school work in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland and England;.
(c) develop comparisons of teachers’ experiences of QAE processes, and of the influence of different management practices and processes of QAE on teacher autonomy, morale and capacity.
This is the analysis that we shall be developing further in the remaining months of the project. Here we can focus on some emergent points about the impacts of QAE regimes on teacher professionalism, morale and performance in different contexts, and begin to identify points of comparison. It might be helpful before moving to a specific focus on the survey data, to review how we in the project approach the issue of teachers and data and to explain some of the shaping assumptions that have prompted our research.
Governing, teachers and data
A key issue for the project is linking the significant growth in data use to the changing nature of governance: we see data as a powerful resource that links new forms of governance preoccupied with the measurement and improvement of performance to the constitution of society as a governable domain. The data turn reflects a political rationality and shapes a social sphere that is calculable and amenable to the practices of government (Rose and Miller 1992). This calculation takes as its subject not only attainment and readily quantifiable outcomes, but sentiments and beliefs (self-management, disposition to work, future orientation and attitudes to risk) and ‘capitalises’ them. By equating social relations and capacities with quantifiable characteristics, traditional ideas of the social are challenged, with consequences for the role of the public, and for the scope and form of public policy. By making sentiments and beliefs quantifiable, governability is enhanced, and at the same time as an ethical discourse of responsibility and accountability is invoked by policy-makers, they promote a diminished idea of the public and of the role and scope of public policy.
Modernised governance thus seeks to create a new hybrid of public and private, a space to be occupied by a redesigned socially and individually responsible citizen, embedded in networks, allowed the freedom to achieve economic and social targets in learning, through work and at home, and encouraged to accept responsibility for success or take the consequences of failure. In this scenario governments use data to (a) assess the capacity of their citizens to accept this responsibility; (b) encourage them to accept it (c) create the impression that this project is technical and rational, rather than political, through references to ‘evidence-based’ policy.
The application of these principles of governance extends to work, including professional work, and to institutions, including schools. Professional work is subject to the same forces of change as other forms of work so that we see a shift from neo-corporatist bargaining systems, from representation through mass organisations (unions) deeply rooted in the social structure, promoting social security; and standardized working conditions. In the formative years of professionalism, work was closely aligned with the welfare state in its various post-war forms (Esping-Andersen 1990) and with its collective forms of life, full employment and national (inclusive) welfare provision.
The new forms of work mirror new forms of social organisation and relations driven by the dynamic power of technological and economic innovation within the framework of global capitalism (Thrift 2005, Brint 2001). This modernisation of capital challenges the power of the national and welfare state and greatly increases risk-including the risk of permanently insecure employment. At the same time, knowledge has become the source of social wealth, an economic resource to be translated by knowledge workers into profit producing innovations (Ozga, Seddon and Popkewitz 2006). This modernisation project shatters the collective identity of labour (including professional labour) and individualises it, removing its capacity to act collectively in relation to working conditions, definition of its interests and the realisation of social projects (Beck 2000). In addition, work relations and work tasks are redesigned with an emphasis on the need for high-level knowledge integration to drive the overall direction and coordination of work/organisational activities (Sennet 2006). Professional work, including teaching, is reshaped by these forces. The economising of education, combined with the ‘responsibilisation’ (Gewirtz 2000) of the individual learner and teacher, combine to displace collective professional action and relations.
The economising of education has produced trends towards a common education policy agenda that may construct a global education policy field (Ozga and Lingard 2007). Teachers are subjected to pressures to perform and to extract performances from learners; to conform with preferred pedagogies and learning styles, while professional formation is shifting towards preparing ‘integrated’ workers. Once again, we can locate these developments in the European policy space that redefine education as learning. As 'learning', it is the focus of European Union policy making and the space for the creation of European identity (European Commission 2001). This is reflected in recent policy technologies: the Lisbon Process or Open Method of Coordination (OMC) (Gornitzka, 2006) in which benchmarking and comparison are core governing processes across a 'learning society' shaped by economic reform, citizenship obligations, employability and the use of OECD policy tools in education (for example PISA) (Grek and Lingard 2007).
In response to this agenda policy texts across Europe share orientations towards raising expectations, giving more freedom to teachers and schools, offering greater choice and opportunity for pupils in order to encourage personalised learning, providing better support for learning and creating ‘tougher, more intelligent accountabilities’ (Eurydice 2006). Much of the redesign seeks to produce more fluid and flexible spaces of schooling, through removing barriers between sectors, abolishing age and stage restrictions on when students can sit exams and establishing international benchmarking. The emphasis on continuous, formative assessment produces a shift towards processes of learning and teaching that encourage the learner-and the teacher-to engage in continuous self-monitoring and forward projection, and also increase reliance on data and data analysis.
Curriculum reform across Europe reflects a policy shift towards defining what kinds of young people should be produced by schooling, rather than what they should know. They are to be successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors to society and responsible citizens, to take an example of local translation of this discourse in Scotland (Eurydice 2006: 8). Personalisation, choice and relevance are woven through the fabric of these discourses, which apply to teachers as well as to pupils. Learning has to be embedded in the learner as a process of continuous monitoring of their capacities against unspecified and possibly unknowable future needs and demands. The OECD’s ‘Schooling for Tomorrow’ initiatives, complete with ‘toolkits’ and ‘scenarios’ to help systems promote ‘desirable futures’, encapsulates this pressure to ‘not just reform but to reinvent education systems’ (OECD/CERI 2007).
The project of individualisation and constant comparison through constant monitoring is made possible through technologies of governance through which data flow, and through the capacity of these technologies (software, data sharing systems, statistical techniques, statistical and analytical bureaux) to connect individual student performance directly to national and transnational indicators of performance. There is a need for the enhanced regulation of professionals, to ensure that they prioritise and exhibit appropriate skills and attitudes. The forms of regulation of teaching in QAE regimes may contain a number of contradictory elements, or may be shifting and changing as different stages in the regulatory process are achieved: ie once the system has been disciplined by external regulation (performance management, inspection, national testing) there is a shift towards ‘softer’ forms (Lawn 2006) of self evaluation, ‘lighter touch’ inspection, and ‘intelligent accountability’.
Stephen Ball (2003) has analysed the changing regulation of teachers through educational restructuring as a shift from previous policy technologies of professionalism and bureaucracy to an interrelated triptych of market form, managerialism and performativity. By ‘policy technology’ Ball means a ‘calculated deployment of techniques and artefacts to organize human forces and capabilities into a functioning network of power’. Managerialism as a policy technology is a normative system legitimising particular versions of ‘how to manage’, for what purposes, in whose interests, and with what knowledge (Newman 2000). Performativity is a culture or a system of 'terror', in Lyotard's words, that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of control, attrition and change. The performances (of individual subjects or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of 'quality', or 'moments' of promotion or inspection. They stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement: 'An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established' (Lyotard 1984 p. 46).
Table 1: Policy technologies: marketisation, managerialism and performativity
1. Marketisation / 2. Managerialism / 3. Performativity(a) parental choice
(b) variety of school types
(c) league tables / (a) devolution of decision-
making
(b)school-based management / (a) target-setting
(b) evaluation
(c) performance related pay
Figure 1: Policy technologies in education: Marketisation, Managerialism and Performativity (after Ball 2003)
This triptych can be seen most clearly in the case of England. Our comparative study and its focus on QAE suggests that comparison and individualisation should be added to the performativity table, along with their operationalisation through data; that competition is a key element of managerialism, and that marketisation might be better understood as commodification.
The discussion so far has emphasised the shared global and European agendas for education/learning and for the redesign of the teaching profession, and the overarching policy technologies through which such redesign is achieved. There is considerable evidence from the earlier period of modernisation of the profession (from the late 1980s to the 1990s) of the negative impact of such developments on teachers-including from earlier research carried out by some members of this project team, that demonstrates the difficulty for professionals of modifying or challenging these reforms which are presented as inevitable and necessary responses to global change. Policy makers and transnational agencies argue that schools can no longer exist in ‘relative isolation’, nor can they resist ‘major societal and technological change’(OECD/CERI 2007). To argue otherwise is to defend entrenched professional conservatism, or to reinforce traditional elite cultures. In this context, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that teachers experience tensions in their work, and that they are caught by the performance agenda, while expressing anxiety about its impact on social cohesion, fairness and diversity (Lindblad and Popkewitz 2001).
We turn now to the role of QAE in these processes, and their effects in local contexts.
QAE and Teachers across the systems: key issues
What do we understand by QAE? Our interest is in all the activities that produce evidence about the performance of education systems in Europe, both nationally and internationally (Henry et al 2001, Rinne 2000, 2003). Clarke has called this the ‘performance-evaluation nexus’ (Clarke 2004) that involves audit, inspection, evaluation and regulation, or, indeed, all of these acting together. But our focus is not on the quality assurance and performance management systems themselves, rather we examine the processes through which such data are collected, selected and ordered, and on the negotiations and interactions that surround such processes at national, local and institutional levels of policy-making (Pollitt et al 1998, Power 1999). QAE is also understood by us as linked to decentralisation, devolution and deregulation as it is a way of steering restructured systems (Whitty, Power and Halpin 1998). And, as we said at the outset, our fundamental interest is in how these processes govern education and teachers.
Some of these issues lend themselves to direct enquiry through survey, for example we asked questions about specific QAE practices (for example the levels of local authority/municipal support, the relative significance of local, school and national target-setting, the importance of school self-evaluation and between school comparisons, the amount of time on QAE tasks). However other aspects, as we have seen in paper 2, are more difficult to examine through direct questioning, and also involve attention to the meanings of key terms in different contexts. Indeed, even at the level of constructing questions about the impact of QAE on teachers’ work, we find that practices of QAE are rooted in different assumptions and traditions, and that, as a consequence, different meanings are attached to these processes by teachers working in different contexts. As pointed out in paper 2, one of the most striking instances occurred in relation to accountability, where there are divisions between teachers working in systems that promote technical accountability (for example England) and those more concerned with political accountability (for example Denmark) (for the different meanings of accountability see Ranson 2003). More work needs to be done on the contextualised comparative analysis, but in the section below we offer some preliminary analysis of comparative trends.
Quality Improves, Respect declines?
The majority of survey respondents believe that the quality of education is improving by comparison with the 1980s: their managers believe this more strongly than do class teachers. The Finnish teachers are most convinced that quality is improving-perhaps because of their PISA results (59%); the Swedish teachers least persuaded (13%) –most of the Swedish respondents think quality has neither improved nor declined. Overall (and excluding Denmark where we do not have data on this question) only 47% of survey respondents think that quality has improved. We must allow for response bias, but even so, this is a fairly low expression of belief in improvement given the level of investment by national systems in promoting QAE. And implanting a belief in continuous improvement is necessary to ensure that these systems work effectively.