School Reform in an Era of Standardization

Authentic Accountabilities

Ian Hardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367893248
• eBook ISBN: 9781000328370
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

School Reform in an Era of Standardization explores how teachers and school-based administrators navigate the processes of accountability and standardization in schooling systems and settings. It provides clear insights into how the work and learning of teachers and students in schools have been dramatically reconstituted by increased pressures of external, political scrutiny and accountability. The book reveals in detail the nature and effects of standardization processes upon schools and schooling systems. Specifically, it shows how curriculum development, teaching and assessment practices have all been recalibrated under conditions of increased external scrutiny of teacher and student work and learning, and how such processes are manifest in curriculum dominated by attention to literacy and numeracy, more 'scripted' pedagogies and standardized testing.

However, the research not only elaborates the detrimental effects of such processes, but also how those responsible for educating in schools – teachers, heads of curriculum, deputy-principals and principals – have responded proactively by interpreting, interrogating and challenging these conditions. In this way, it provides resources for hope – evidence of what are described as more 'authentic accountabilities' – and at the same time it provides a clear portrait of the difficulty of fostering substantive curriculum, teaching and assessment reform during an era of increasingly reductive accountability processes. It will be an invaluable resource for understanding and enhancing practices in schools and school systems in the decades to come, and for giving hope to educators in the ongoing work of rebuilding trust in public education.

1
INTRODUCTION

The rise of accountability and audit in schools

Introduction

This book explores how the increased focus on more standardized approaches to educational accountability has influenced key aspects of schooling policy and practice. This includes particular attention to the organization of curriculum, teaching and, perhaps most obviously, assessment.

In the overview of their account of education, Robertson and Dale (2015) argue for an understanding of educational practices that brings into conversation processes of political economy with various forms of cultural analyses. Such an account seeks to understand education as not simply a provider of educational qualifications, but as ‘a complex and variegated agency of social reproduction, broadly conceived’ (p. 150). While the nature and extent to which educational practices are reproductive is contested, there is clear evidence that educational practices are deeply reflective of broader social processes in which they are embedded, and of which they are simultaneously constitutive. Robertson and Dale (2015) argue that practices and processes that constitute an educational ensemble are not always readily apparent, even as they have very real effects:

Given its stratified ontology, not all of what goes on in any education ensemble is visible. As a result, our explanations of education ensembles need to take into account those mechanisms and processes that are not observable but which have real effects.

(p. 150)

In this volume, I argue that key components of such ensembles in recent times are the accountability practices and processes that seek to manage and monitor schooling. Such practices and processes are manifest in a variety of ways. This includes, drawing upon what Bernstein (1971) described almost five decades ago, as the three ‘message systems’ of schooling: curriculum, teaching and assessment. These message systems are the conduits through which that which is valued is communicated in schooling. These message systems flag which knowledge is most powerful, and how such knowledge is organized, conveyed and evaluated. They also reveal the inherently political nature of curriculum, teaching and testing practices.

This book seeks to explore the nature of these power relations, and particularly how those influenced by broader accountability processes in relation to curriculum development, teaching and assessment practices have responded. The research endeavours to reveal the nature of educators’ responses to accountability practices in and across these domains, and the extent to which they exert agency under such circumstances. At the same time, these ensembles are characterized by broader, global processes of governance that are increasingly complex and that exert influence in multiple and varied ways.

Accountability and audit technologies

An important part of the managerial and bureaucratic apparatus that seeks to exert control over the work and learning of educators is the ability to ‘account’ for the practices of those engaged in schooling settings. Under conditions in which social practice has become increasingly influenced by economic prerogatives, there has also been an emphasis on economic productivity over other forms of being, elevating modes of financial rationality. This, in turn, has led to the rearticulation of practice, characterized by a need to ‘keep track’ of the success or otherwise of this approach, necessitating forms of counting and ‘accounting’. Importantly, this has led to a substantive change in practice and conformity to a financial logic, regardless of the parameters of the actual practice in which such logics have come to exert influence:

This overlaying of financial rationality did not leave the organizations as they found them. Organizations had to be rendered accountable, and the terms of that accountability were not professional but those of accounting. They were reorganized, transformed into aggregations of accountable spaces, reshaped into cost-centres and the like, rendered calculable in financial terms.

(Rose, 1999, p. 152)

These processes of accountability are greatly enhanced by various forms of ‘audit’ technologies that seek to render knowable forms of knowledge and practice that may appear complex or problematically irregular from the outside. Processes of audit dramatically change that to which they are directed:

Rendering something auditable shapes the process that is to be audited: setting objectives, proliferating standardized forms, generating new systems of record-keeping and accounting, governing paper trails. The logics and technical requirements of audit displace the internal logics of expertise.

(Rose, 1999, p. 154)

Power (1997) refers to an ‘audit explosion’ to try to capture the dramatic increase in focus on such prerogatives, and how they alter more established relations. While auditing has traditionally been considered ‘distinctly unglamorous’ (Power, 1997, p. xi), the dramatic increase in processes of auditing and applications well beyond the financial practices and processes to which they were originally directed reflects how audit technologies have taken on a life of their own, influencing all aspects of social life, including education. Rose (1999) argues that through processes of new public management, new forms of governing of practice have come into being. New processes of ‘costing’ and accounting mean that processes of professional autonomy no longer hold sway. The consequence is that new forms of commensurability become possible. Each decision is made ‘knowable’, often through the use of numbers. Such numbers enable processes of comparison, and ‘can be transported to centres of calculation, aggregated, related, plotted over time, presented in league tables, judged against national averages, and utilized for future decisions’ (Rose, 1999, p. 153). Through such practices, an air of objectivity can be conveyed that fosters a sense in which an elevated air of neutrality can always be maintained, and that such neutrality is a mark of the success of processes of audit and accountability. On such renderings, professional judgement and autonomy become much less consequential, and may be construed as inherently limited and limiting.

Accountability and audit in school education

In recent decades, since such processes have become increasingly apparent, a variety of technologies have arisen that serve as various sorts of ‘infrastructures’ that contribute towards the management and modulation of accountability and audit processes, and these are clearly evident in schooling practices today. In their account of the uses of data and their effects on schooling practices in the United States, Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge and Jacobsen (2013) refer to an ‘infrastructure of accountability’ to try to capture the nature of various forms of surveillance and control mechanisms in contemporary schooling practice. As with so many recent accounts of schooling, with their focus on pedagogies of standardized testing (Kempf, 2016), and various forms of ‘globalized educational accountabilities’ (Lingard, Martino, Rezai-Rashti and Sellar, 2016), Anagnostopoulos et al. (2013) emphasize the effects of testing practices. They focus particular attention on the ‘information infrastructure’ associated with testing – the many systems designed to develop, produce, monitor and manage the multitude of data produced through various forms of school, district, state, national and international testing systems. These data have been used for a variety of purposes, including as a vehicle for public accountability, via the mass media:

Test-based accountability has spurred states to create large-scale information systems that gather, process, and disseminate information on the characteristics and performance of schools, teachers, and students. Data from these systems are made available to ever-widening audiences and used to inform decisions across and beyond the educational system.

(Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013, p. 1)

However, and even as testing is central to contemporary accountability regimes, closer inspection of current policy, curricula and approaches to teaching also reveal evidence of standardization of not just testing, but also how knowledge is presented in and to schools and schooling systems, and the nature of the teaching that is particularly valued and valuable under these circumstances. In this sense, arguably, infrastructures of accountability are also readily apparent across the three message systems of schooling.

It is the displacement of forms of accountability and audit expertise which has had such an influence on these three message systems. Meyer, Tröhler, Labaree and Hutt (2014) argue that accountability is becoming a ‘normal’, accepted part of educational practice, focused on economic growth and development, rather than democratic participation; accountability is ‘a pervasive normalizing discourse, legitimizing historical shifts in educational policy from a social and cultural project of facilitating democratic citizenship to an economic project of engendering usable skills and “competences”’ (p. 1). There is also a sense in which the current trends in accountability involve processes of redirecting influence for education from the local level of practitioners to a national and global cadre of policy actors operating from more economic and statistical backgrounds. Rather than focusing on a local ‘practical’ – practice-based – conception of education, this broader political and professional assemblage of policy protagonists focus attention on local practices insofar as they are responsive and reflective of broader, national and international markers of attainment and achievement. Such a focus has the effect of eliding contextual difference and contingency, and cultivating a homogenous conception of education that is far removed from the complexity of actual educational practice. At the same time, this process has involved a ‘tightening into’ these national and international markers of attainment – a shift from ‘softer’ forms of governance to ‘harder’ more specific and measurable modes of achievement, as expressed through these more centralized indicators.

Policy processes: Policy development and enactment

So how have such accountability practices and processes been able to exert such influence? A key reason for the effects of accountability and audit technologies is the way in which they have proved so attractive at the level of national and sub-national policy-making. This has been enabled through processes of policy-borrowing at a global level.

Global education policy-borrowing as a vehicle for audit and accountability

Even as much of the literature, data and analysis presented in this book are focused on schooling practices of policy-making, curriculum, teaching and assessment as locally situated (i.e., in specific sub-national systems and school sites), these practices are simultaneously understood as exhibiting characteristics of both national and more global practices and processes. This is evident through the way in which particular foci and practices are reflected in multiple educational settings in different parts of the world, albeit always mediated by the particular histories and spatialities that characterize each unique site (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Such knowledges often constitute forms of ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005) in which government and non-government organizations are engaged in processes of constantly monitoring practices and collecting information about practices to inform their work, for broader economic prerogatives.

Curriculum, teaching and assessment practices do not simply exist in isolation. Rather they are both product and productive of broader processes of audit and accountability that have come to characterize schooling. While a considerable focus of attention in this book is how these processes of accountability are enacted in schools in specific national and sub-national contexts – and particularly empirical research from one sub-national government school system (Queensland, Australia) to illustrate these processes – these empirical insights are provided as instances of broader processes of the standardization of public schooling practices in different countries and educational systems throughout the world. The tensions referred to in the Queensland context are reflective of broader pressures and processes operating globally that seek to exert influence on more ‘local’ practices. These effects are particularly felt in Anglo settings, but increasingly in European contexts, as well as operating (albeit differently) in other national and cultural settings.¹ The seemingly ubiquitous focus on processes of audit and accountability across national contexts is supported at a global level by policy processes of global policy-borrowing on the part of governments (Phillips & Ochs, 2003). These processes of ‘borrowing’ policy entail that some form of learning has occurred in the first instance; indeed, this capacity to learn from other cultures and contexts is a fundamental premise on which research into comparative education might best be understood (Phillips, 2000). However, the extent to which this is actually the case is very much an empirical issue, and open to question.

The challenges associated with notions of ‘borrowing’ begin with the very nature of the term itself, and the impermanence of whatever it is to be ‘borrowed’ that is implied by the term: ‘[the term borrowing] clearly implies temporariness, and temporary solutions to educational problems are more often than not unsatisfactory’ (Phillips, 2000, p. 299). Drawing on the work of Steiner-Khamsi (2004), Lingard (2010) also refers to processes of policy-borrowing to capture the way in which educational reforms at the national (and sub-national) levels have been taken up in the context of broader, global, pressures for increased economic performance. Such processes involve taking up particular initiatives from specific contexts, but without necessarily ‘learning’ from the experiences of the application of these ideas. In the push to ensure responsiveness to what are construed as ‘successful’ practices, or practices arising in response to particular jurisdictions’ struggles to reform education, this disjuncture between policy-borrowing and actually learning from the experience of the adoption of particular policy prerogatives in different contexts seems to be elided.

In large measure, this process of global policy-borrowing is a result of the increased influence of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and in schooling settings, particularly the impact of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Given the OECD is an intergovernmental body that exerts influence on member countries, but without the capacity to directly set policy, this focus on PISA as a vehicle for reform represents a form of ‘soft power’ (Nye Jr, 2004) that can be deployed to achieve desired ends; in the case of the OECD, these ends entail increasing influence on national policy prerogatives, ultimately oriented to improved economic performance, as a marker of its own esteem amongst member states.

A key part of this process is the ability to foster understanding in relation to efforts to compare educational practices and outcomes across national contexts. Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) refer to the increased interest and focus on comparative education, and how this increased atte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The rise of accountability and audit in schools
• PART I Philosophy, policy and politics
• PART II The politics of practice
• Index