Teachers and the State

Towards a Directed Profession

Mike Bottery, Nigel Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134613304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines the status of training and continuing professional development of teachers on a national and international level. The authors argue that teachers need to feel that they are part of an empowering professionalism, in which their work has an effect on the abilities of students, and where they play a valuable role in shaping the direction of future society.

1
THE CONTEXT OF TEACHERS’ DEPROFESSIONALISATION

Introduction: the historical context

The role and function of an education system, and of the teachers within it, have not recently and suddenly become matters of pressing political concern. Deliberation on such issues has been accompanied—indeed has largely prompted—the formation of systems since national systems were first conceived. The key word here, indeed, is ‘national’, because it was the creation of the nation-state that largely explains the development of the education systems we know today. Thus, the majority of the older education systems around the world—such as those in Germany, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan—were initially conceived at a time when these countries were preeminently concerned with questions of state formation. This was for a number of reasons: they might still be in the process of formation, in which ties were as at least as much to the local as to the national (France, Germany, United States); they might just have gone through a revolutionary period which called into question old assumptions, and/or were still seeking a legitimacy for their rule (France, Italy); or, finally, they might have gone through a period of foreign military and cultural invasion, and needed to establish their own cultural and political legitimacy (Germany, Japan, Italy). Their primary functions then were not initially driven by concerns for social equality, of a desire to spread a love of learning, or even with the advancement of economic performance by providing a workforce with the requisite skills and attitudes to service the industries of the countries involved. Instead, as Green (1997, p.) argues, they were designed

…to spread the dominant cultures and inculcate popular ideologies of nationhood, to forge the political and cultural unity of the burgeoning nation-states, and to cement the ideological hegemony of their dominant classes.

England is the example that proves the rule. It was a country with a greater political stability and fixed cultural identity than most, and it was the first country to industrialise, and this before any serious conception of an educational system. In such circumstances, it is understandable that of the Western European countries, England was the slowest to develop a national system—there was, it was believed, less need. Only questions of social stability (making sure that a working class knew its place), of ethics (a belief by some of the right of all to an education) and of a dawning realisation of the need to be economically competitive, forced the late development of a fully fledged system in the early years of the twentieth century. However, this chapter will argue that it is the realisations of other countries—the need for legitimation, for a degree of cultural unity, and for a developed economic competitiveness— that are now driving the system in England and Wales at the present time.

Indeed, the lessons of these other countries have not been lost on developing countries today. If Japan is one of the clearest examples of an education system being treated as a tool of national development, it is an example that the ‘Asian Tigers’ of Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan have taken on board. These ‘developmental states’ have consistently used education for two major ends. Firstly, and paralleling the inception of earlier systems like Japan, they have used education as a means of constructing national identity and state power. Secondly, however, and now paralleling the growing concerns of Western governments in the second half of the twentieth century, they have used their education systems for developing their economic competitiveness, by intervening to direct and regulate economic activity towards certain specified national ends.

And what of the understanding of teachers in such systems? The problem for teachers is that they are human beings. They are limited both in their lifespan and in their knowledge capacity. They have an average lifespan of less than eighty years, and a working lifespan of little more than forty. Their memories are necessarily short, and their understanding of events worldwide is limited. Understandably, unless they have lived through periods of great change, and are able to compare one regime with another, they will tend to think that what they live under, and perform within, is the norm. The dominant belief of teachers in England and Wales, for instance, who have had at least a dozen years of experience under their belt, regarding the ‘proper’ role of teaching, will probably be one of professional autonomy. They were, after all, born into, trained for and practised within a system that encouraged a belief in their professional authority, independence and capability. Yet a brief glance at the changing role of headteachers in England and Wales (Table 1.1) would show that their experience was a fairly lengthy but nevertheless transitory phase; and as the speed of change has increased, so their role has changed as rapidly. The first phase lasted for a century, the second phase for thirty to forty years, the third for only ten to fifteen years before apparently being replaced by the present condition.

What this argues then is that, were human beings to have a longer lifespan and a wider experience, teachers would be much more aware of the fact that their experience was not the norm, but a product of very special conditions, peculiar to a particular time and place. However, the danger with this awareness is that it would then be very easy to adopt a relativist position—to argue that because the role of an education system has varied with time and place, and as the role of teachers has similarly varied, so their role should only be defined by an historical context. In other words, any book on teachers’ deprofessionalisation is necessarily limited to a particular time and place. Yet this is to commit the naturalistic fallacy, for just because teachers’ roles have been determined in the past by the systems they have worked within is no reason to suggest that this is the way it should be.

Table 1.1 The changing role of the headteacher in England and Wales (1850–2000)

Indeed, this book will argue that a crucial function of teachers as professionals needs to be their engagement with matters beyond the classroom, as part of a larger picture of citizen education. And this citizen education, as Green (1997, p.) argues, needs to be

…conscious of the interdependence of nations, the diversity of societies, and the necessarily global nature of solutions to the world’s problems, [one that would] eschew the narrow cultural chauvinism which has characterised much of what has passed for national education…equally, recognising the importance of cohesion and solidarity in modern societies, it would seek to promote new and more inclusive forms of national identity.

This kind of citizen education is necessary not only because it is seen as the best way of equipping students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to cope with an increasingly chaotic and unpredictable world—the historical context—but also because such an approach is underpinned by a set of principles concerned with the development of democracy, participation, equality and respect, which transcend the situation of a world at the turn of the millennium. Yet for teachers to provide such an education they need these kinds of knowledge, skills, attitudes and principles themselves; and these do not happen if they are seen—and see themselves—as some lower-order technician in an economically determined state hierarchy.

Deprofessionalisation, then, is also a term that has wider currency than any one particular context. Whilst there will necessarily be variation from country to country, the argument here is that the re-conceptualisation of the teaching profession is essential to the development of democratic government—and we believe that this is no parochial concern.

In the present context of what is argued as a period of teachers’ deprofessionalism, a little historical background is therefore needed. This background will form the backdrop to developments over the last decade or so, and then lead directly into the kinds of changes that are happening at present. As we have argued, there are clearly particular issues of national culture, political personality, and geographical events which make each system’s reaction to wider phenomena fairly individual. Nevertheless, there are supra-national strands which are more important and more intrusive upon national educational policies than in the past. From this kind of picture it will be possible to chart the changing role of the professional, and of the need to conceptualise the educational agenda rather differently from how it is pictured at present. This, then, will be the purpose of this chapter.

Development of recent educational policies

It has already been argued that education systems have normally been seen as pivotal to state formation, legitimacy, cultural unification and, lately, economic and cultural competitiveness. Indeed, as one nation’s economic star rises and another’s wanes, a standard object of scrutiny has been the strengths and weaknesses of the education systems. Thus, calls for a radical re-think of the US education system occurred after 1961 when the Russians beat the Americans in putting the first man into space. They recurred in the 1970s (Silberman 1973), and again in the 1980s when Japan rose to challenge its economic hegemony, and continued in the 1990s (e.g. Chubb and Moe 1990), and so on to this day, with the rise of Charter schools (Wohlstetter et al. 1995). Part of the blame for this parlous state of affairs with the education system was located with the teaching profession, for not gearing their schools to the current needs of society—though it should be noted that some commentators have argued that this was very largely manufactured (e.g. Berliner and Biddle 1995).

In the United Kingdom, whilst issues were raised about the state of education in the 1960s (e.g. the Black Papers), it required the deep financial difficulties generated by the oil crises of the early 1970s to spark off governmental action. Prime Minister Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin College speech asked (i.e. doubted) whether education was providing industry with the workers with training in the basic subject necessities, and unequivocally stated that government needed to be involved in more than the determination of structure and resource allocation. It had, he argued, a responsibility to ensure that what was happening internally was to the advantage of children, parents and the nation as a whole.

A number of implications stemmed from comments like these, and much comment from then on. The first was that an educational system should not be there for the benefit and enjoyment of its producers, but for its recipients, whether these be conceptualised as children, parents, or government and industry. This increase in demands upon ‘producers’ from both above and below will be seen to be a characteristic of much reform in not only England and Wales, but internationally as well. Thus, systems as varied in form and function as England and Wales, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United States, and Sweden began to move towards various forms of increased implementational and financial decentralisation (see Whitty et al. 1998). At the same time, these were accompanied by governmental increased control of policy through tighter specification of content and/or output—what Neave (1998) came to call the rise of the ‘evaluative state’.

This was a time when governments increasingly came to believe that this ‘producer capture’ had been the case for far too long, a suspicion of professionals which also ran counter to much of the accepted wisdom until that time. Table 1.2 suggests that for the period from the Second World War, there had been a general consensus that education systems, as so much else of welfare states in Western countries, were in the ‘safe’ hands of the professionals. Governments, the general public, public service managers, and the professionals themselves saw their welfare state systems as ones that were underpinned by professions who through their expertise had the ability to know what needed to be done; and who through their codes of ethics and altruism could be trusted not only to know what was best, but also would do this as well. They could and should be trusted to perform their crucial social functions in an independent and autonomous manner. This period, from the middle 1940s to the middle 1970s, was, as most commentators on Western educational systems now accept, the golden age of teachers’ professional autonomy and public regard. Teachers accepted that governments provided the broad legislative framework for education, but they were crucial in interpreting this framework, and in being the dominant suppliers. In such a system, there were few if any government-specified outputs—these were for the professionals to define. Social democratic regimes were essentially concerned with government performing the ‘steering’ of the education system, the ‘rowing’ to be largely determined and monopolised by its servants (see Osborne and Gaebler 1992).

Table 1.2 Steering and rowing—policy changes since the Second World War

Now it is fairly easy for governments to grant these kinds of concessions to professional bodies when economies are buoyant, and when there are few resource constraints. It is also fairly easy when it is believed that the introduction of such a system will decrease problems, rather than create new ones. It is also not going to be seen as problematic when governmental attention is devoted to the building of structures and issues of resource allocation rather than that of internal practice. Finally, when governments lack the political will, and believe that they also lack the expertise to know how to go about determining just how good a job professionals are actually doing, problems with such a solution are hardly going to loom large.

Yet times change, and when such changes cause difficulties, governments will take a much harder look at professional practice. Three of these changes will be mentioned here. Firstly, at an institutional level, it became increasingly apparent that what happened internally in terms of practices and procedures was just as important an influence on outcomes as structures. In such circumstances it is unsurprising that there is a demand for the role of management to change from a facilitatory to a much more interventionist one. Secondly, at national level, demographic trends meant that populations became increasingly older, and as they did so, there was an increasingly declining tax base to draw on, putting greater pressure on government spending, and upon the financing of the welfare state—another reason for examining professional practice. Thirdly, at an international level, competitiveness intensified as formerly underdeveloped and developing countries became more competitive in terms of both cheap labour and in the production of finished goods. In such circumstances, economic growth became that much harder to generate, and yet again government finances came under pressure. Professional practice, like much else, would be more closely scrutinised.

The rise of the market

It is not surprising that as long ago as 1977, in a Green Paper, the Labour government of the United Kingdom made a statement that has increasingly come to represent the attitudes of governments generally in the provision of education:

It would not be compatible with the duties of the Secretaries of State to promote the education of the people of England and Wales, or with their accountability to Parliament, to abdicate from leadership on educational issues which have become a matter of lively public concern.
(para. 2.19)

This is a very clear statement that the long honeymoon with the teaching profession was over—government would now be interested not just in structures and finance but in practice as well.

It took the advent of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher to generate significant educational reform, and then of a form that incorporated very strong New Right market influences, influences that went beyond the United Kingdom. Chubb and Moe (1990), for instance, claim to have drawn huge inspiration for their proposed reforms to the United States from the other side of the Atlantic. These influences have also become important currency beyond the political right, with the concept of an ‘internal market’ (Enthoven 1985) as well as that of ‘Market Socialism’ (LeGrand and Estrin 1989) now being concepts seriously debated in all the major political parties throughout the Western world. The introduction and development of competition, and the use of some kind of market to engender it, are now a standard feature of virtually all areas of welfare state provision, including that of education.

In the United Kingdom, Conservative governments were at pains to stress their determination to introduce a market-place in education and to stimulate competition between schools through such policies as creating different kinds of providers (e.g. city technology colleges and grantmaintained schools). The policy was enhanced by increasing the degree of local financial control through devolving high levels of finance to schools by means of the Local Management of Schools (LMS), as well as the expansion of consumer choice through open enrolment for pupil numbers. Greater public accountability, which thereby allowed the consumer to make a more informed choice, was attempted through the provision of data about pupil and school. The market philosophy of education thus sought to empower parents as customers by providing information, opportunities and alternatives, and to make schools more conscious of, and responsive to those they existed to serve.

It was a system, then, that meant that teachers in the public sector had to accept competition from other suppliers, and the increased use of market standards to determine the success and failure of their outputs. If social democracy had favoured steering and rowing, this new ideology, at least in part, espoused a drastic reduction in government steering, and a rowing decided much more by competition between institutions (see Figure I.2). The impact on professional practice was twofold. At the practical level, it meant that schools became much more like businesses or schools in the private sector, for school and job survival depended upon success in the market-place. Creativity was to be encouraged within an entrepreneurial paradigm. The school principal began to look increasingly like a chief executive of a business, the teachers the foot-soldiers in this new exercise. Curricula and teaching methods, where they were not decided at national level, would be increasingly determined by client feedback—the customer might not be always right, but their concerns would necessarily have to play an increasing part in any educational agenda. The days of the Dionysian teacher (Handy 1985), when the school was seen as being there to facilitate the wishes of the professional, were increasingly numbered.

The second impact on professional practice was to re-conceptualise this much more along business lines. There was a hugely increased expansion of management courses and management literature which drew upon the business world for its inspiration. Teachers were exhorted to read Peters and Waterman, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Drucker, and Charles Handy, not only for the issues they raised, but also for the value framework within which their thoughts were contextualised. And if this business context was not specifically recommended, its use as a framework for educational thinking was certainly not discouraged. The language of business now invaded the teaching lexicon: producers, customers, products, entrepreneurialism, efficiency and effectiveness now replaced teachers, pupils, par...