Re-imagining Accountability from a Standpoint of Regional Identity: Possibilities for Collaboration Rather than Individual Schools in Competition
Author(s):
Marie Brennan (presenting / submitting) Lew Zipin (presenting)
Conference:
ECER 2014
Network:
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

23 SES 06 C, Accountability, (In)equality and Social Justice

Paper Session

Time:
2014-09-03
15:30-17:00
Room:
B334 Sala de Aulas
Chair:
Xavier Rambla

Contribution

This paper analyses an Australian case in which current, local practices within a regional group of schools allows us to re-imagine accountability as a collaborative activity rather than putting schools in competition, as is typical when an individual schools is the unit of reporting and analysis.

This paper starts from the following research questions:

  • How might a group of schools in a rural area, induced by governmental pressures towards working collaboratively, build towards a different mode of responsibility for accounting for the education of that region’s school children?
  • What kinds of possibilities does this case illustrate for interrupting ‘accountability as usual’ and entering into alternative ways of imagining relationships for giving account of their educational work?

The objectives of the paper are:

  • To describe the conditions in which a cluster of schools, in a rural Australian region of high poverty, developed unusually collaborative relations in response to governmental pressures, acting from a distance on each school, that were difficult to cope with individually.
  • To analyse the interactive responses of the schools in this regional case for how they suggest possibilities to re-imagine accountability in ways that serve richer social purposes than mere answerability to narrowing yet powerful demands of government.
  • To ‘scale up’ the suggestive possibilities of this case, considering their implications for policy.

Theoretically, this paper is framed within traditions of critical educational policy analysis (see Rizvi & Lingard 2010), taking account of how globalising forces intersect with local processes, in which neoliberal governance technologies have been installed for some considerable time. Accountability has been a significant policy keyword in many countries in the past two decades, across Europe, the USA and other ‘westernised’ nations (including Australia). Accountability processes have largely been adopted by governments, put into operation, and regulated, under devolutionary neoliberal logics of ‘governance by numbers’ (Lingard et al 2012; Barry et al 1996) and ‘steering from a distance’ (Kickert 1990), with increasingly narrowing effects on the purposes and practices of schools and school systems (Rizvi & Lingard 2010;). Accountability has thus become a marker of the governance turn, developing what Lingard, Martino & Rezai-Rashti (2013) call ‘global panopticism’, in which numbers and systems for holding educational institutions accountable circulate as a form of risk management of and by the state. As part of a European and world-wide trend towards school autonomy (Eurydice 2007), the role of accountability in governmental risk management in education has taken a range of forms, though largely organised around standardised test scores. The paper uses the term ‘vertical accountability’ to name the logic of accounting that is imposed upon schools from above. However, in the case that is described and analysed, the paper sees emergence of a different logic, called ‘horizontal accountability’, more along the lines of reciprocal giving of accounts, across multiple standpoints, that constitutes a richer sharing of information about schooling contexts, from which alternative educational approaches can be imagined. This logic resonates with Biesta’s (2004) argument that more ethically connotative discourses of ‘accountability’ have existed historically and need reclaiming in educational practice and policy of current times. This paper joins this project of reclamation through its analysis of a case of unusual cooperation across schools, offering (re)imaginative suggestions for alternative, horizontal approaches to accountability. This offers new possibilities for international debates on school accountability which will have resonances in European school systems. 

Method

This paper emerges from a longitudinal study (2011-2015), combining ethnographic interviews and observations with descriptive statistical methods, as well as curriculum projects by teachers (supported by university researchers), and a ‘Learning Commission’ in which, along with school staff and students, various community members give ‘testimony’—informative accounts—addressing the learning needs of young people in the region. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council (LP100200841). Through the empirical work of the project, the researchers are building analysis and theory about how to pursue greater equity in school learning outcomes though ‘richer’ modes of accountability. The geographical location of the project is a high-poverty rural region in the state of Queensland. Eight schools of this region are involved in the project: five secondary and three primary. As a regional case study, this paper draws upon data from all eight schools. The data set includes: 1) demographic and test data of the eight participating schools of the region; 2) notes from researcher team meetings with principals collectively; 3) individual interviews with principals primarily, as well as some teachers, parents and other senior officers of the state education authority; and 4) notes taken at ‘hearings’ of the Learning Commission. This data speaks greatly to the limits of current approaches to accountability, particularly in relation to a regional school setting. However, along with its critical import, the data also enters into conversation with a ‘will to imagine otherwise’ among the project’s informants as well as the research team, engaging in what Mills (1956) has called ‘sociological imagination’ that does not establish a teleological determinist relationship to the future but rather works to possibilise through articulation of viable alternative realities. The paper, in its analysis, takes up Biesta’s (2004) challenge to conceive and operationalise ethical responsibility for reworking relationships of accountability in our historic times and social spaces. As such, the analytical framing of the paper is a philosophical/ethical engagement with possible futures for alternative modes of accountability in schools and school systems, aiming to disrupt the now taken-for-granted shibboleths of neoliberal accountability where the unit of accounting is the individual school, teacher, student or nation state, each of which competes with other individuals assumed to be ‘like’, or pressured to become ‘like’ (with the expectation that some will succeed while others fail) through accountable conformity to normative ‘standards’.

Expected Outcomes

The school principals in this study feel their isolation is due to rural ‘remoteness’, greater poverty than in most Australian regions, and, not least, state education department tendencies to ‘desk audit’ rather than travel to their region. In response, over time they have developed impulses and processes for collegial communication and action on issues they face ‘together’ (across differences in given school contexts), particularly in relation to system demands, including simplistically negative evaluations coming ‘down’ from governmental distance. They meet together, support one another, induct newcomer principals, and discuss shared concerns about gaps between policy demands and viable practices. They are articulate about how accountability regimes set them up to compete for students, reputation, staff and participation in state and federal-funded programs. They tell tales about how the two impulses of competition and cooperation often co-exist uneasily, yet they work through the tensions out of need to stand together. For example, despite each schools being required to improve in national standardised literacy/numeracy scores to qualify for continued ‘disadvantaged’ funding, schools with sufficient resources for professional development and coaches for improving scores shared those resources with schools unable to afford them. They talk together about ways to buffer staff and students from effects of external judgements, about learning from each other’s alternative curriculum programs for ‘challenged’ students, about how to present their schools’ efforts to local media in positive lights, and more. These co-operations in the face of competitive inducements allow us to imagine reciprocal modes of multi-school ‘accountability’ for educating a geographic area’s whole student population. In policy terms, the paper explores two options: 1) arrangements that might operationalise cooperative responsibility across diverse schools, including measures to indicate successful shared responsibility; and 2) how responsibilities might be shared across different stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, principals, community and employer agencies.

References

Barry, A., T. Osborne, and N. Rose. 1996. Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neoliberalism and the rationalities of government. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Biesta, G. 2004. Education, accountability, and the ethical demand: Can the democratic potential of accountability be regained? Educational Theory 54:3, 233–50. Eurydice Unit (2007) School Autonomy in Europe: Policies and Measures. http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/eurydice./documents/thematic_reports/090EN.pdf Harvey, D. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lingard, B., Martino, W. & Rezai-Rashti, G. (2013) Testing regimes, accountabilities and education policy: commensurate global and national developments, Journal of Education Policy, 28:5, 539-556. Lingard, Bob, Creagh, Sue and Vass, Greg (2012) Education policy as numbers: Data categories and two Australian cases of misrecognition. Journal of Education Policy, 27 3: 315-333. Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, London. Rizvi, F. & Lingard, B. 2010. Globalizing Education Policy. Routledge, London Webb, P.T. (2011): The evolution of accountability, Journal of Education Policy, 26:6, 735-756.

Author Information

Marie Brennan (presenting / submitting)
Victoria University, melbourne, Australia
School of Education
Melbourne
Lew Zipin (presenting)
Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

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