Title Case: Education Consultancy in Consultocracy Times

Author(s):

Sandra Vatrella(presenting / submitting)Roberto Serpieri(presenting)Emiliano Grimaldi

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

28. Sociologies of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

28 SES 02, Europeanization in Practice: Policies, Big Data and Consultocracy

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

15:15-16:45

Room:

106.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Romuald Normand

Contribution

The fabrication of the European education as space of standardisation and control, through outputs, accountability, quantitative data and performances raises new questions about how current transformations are leading to an increasing  influence of ‘non-educational’ actors coming from business and/or philanthropies and from the economic field such as banks and business universities. This transition leaves us with dilemmas about the clashing of discourses (the welfarist and the neo-liberist) on the knowledge/power eduscape in Europe.

What Does Italian education system tells us about knowledge production in the field of education?
What about the role played by institutions, subjects and technologies that act as consultants, interpreters and carriers of a ‘neo-managerialist imaginary’ (Gunter et al., 2014)?

To articulate some responses to these question, we will focus on a specific policy process, that is the reform of the accountability policies of the Italian Education System, as part of a wider modernisation of the Italian Education State.

In particular, the ‘long way’ to the establishment of a National School Evaluation System, the last policy of school evaluation, will be presented following the trajectory of a pilot conducted with 300 schools that voluntary adopted a new methodology, called VALES, adhering to the guidelines of the National Agency for School Evaluation (INVALSI).

The questions involve the following specific objectives:

1) To discuss the main drivers of the process of transition/change/modernisation of the Italian education system, which have in common the increasing “involvement in private consultants at all levels of public education provision” (Gunter et al., 2014, p. 4). A specific attention devoted to the establishment of new evaluation machinery as the main vehicles for this process of reculturing.

2) To analyse the experimental introduction of two pilot policies to evaluate schools and head teachers(VSQ: Evaluation to Develop School Quality; VALES: evaluation and Develop of the School), their design and enactment as an assemblage of institutions, subjects, processes and artefacts. For this purpose, the role played by these two policies in widening the spaces for policy privatisation and consultancy, will be highlighted.

3) To analyse the VALES policy and to address the analysis of the evaluation artefacts as governmental dispositif. A specific attention devoted to the extent to which the new evaluation machinery performs the power to subjectivate the consultants as enunciative modalities, which are ‘spoken’ by the NPM discourse.

Briefly,drawing on the CEP (critical education policy) studies, the proposal deals with the issue of knowledge production in the field of education, as an on-going ‘endogenous privatisation’ of the education system (Ball and Youdell 2008), which spreads from Europe to Italy, as increasing involvement in private consultants at all levels of public education provision (Gunther et. al., 2014). It is a ‘managerialist’ regime of government clearly inspired by the School Improvement: the main approach to “education management in managerialist times” (Thrupp and Willmott 2003) that provides (and imposes the need for) a new plethora of technologies to measure, inspect, control and evaluate.

Following this conceptual/theoretical framework, first we have challenged the analysis that regards Italy as ‘late comer’ (Kickert 2007) in the introduction of NPM reforms (Grimaldi and Serpieri 2013), and the education field as one of the most resistant to NPM, second we have identified the new spaces for what has been called ‘consultocracy’ (Gunter et al., 2014); a space within which an assemblage of institutions, subjects, processes and artefacts performs the power to subjectivate the consultants, who are in turn smoothly brought to ‘adhere’ to organisational and evaluation epistemologies of the NPM.

Method

In order to pursue the above-mentioned objectives, we made the following methodological choices. Regarding the first objective, the research moves towards a genealogy of school evaluation in Italy, following two main trajectories as long as they have been traced by educational policies since the School Autonomy Reform and the creation of the Head teachers’ role. The first is about the evaluation policy of Head teachers themselves, a ‘troubled history’ of failing pilots since 2000 (Grimaldi and Serpieri 2013). The second trajectory regards the controversial establishing of a National Evaluation System since 2004 (Landri 2014), mainly focused on learning standards and school evaluation. In the matter of the second objective, using network ethnography (Ball and Junemann 2012, Olmedo 2013), we have reconstructed the assemblages (of both human and non human actors) produced through the enactment of the two pilot policies, VSQ and VALES that represent, in our view, a shift point for the Italian education system. We focused both on the heterarchical networks that have designed the policy dispositifs and the performative powers that these dispositifs have in creating and opening up spaces for new ‘non-educational’ expert subjectivities, whose ‘advice and expertise’ increasingly become obligatory passage points for policy-makers, schools, professionals who are willing to embrace the ‘holy crusade’ to improvement. Regarding the third objective, we deconstructed the evaluation protocol (VALES), following two main trajectories. The first regards the load bearing axes of the theoretical system (conceptual dimensions) that underlies VALES protocol and inform each evaluation process level (Ricolfi 1997); the second is about the detection tools (grids for data collections, documents, and so on). Briefly, using hermeneutics, we focused on “the dialectic between the understanding of the text as a whole and the interpretation of its parts” (Gadamer 1976, p. 117). In so doing, through the intertwining between conceptual dimensions and detection tools, ‘discursive definitions’ and ‘operational definitions’, the ‘descriptions’ emerge as guided by “anticipated explanations”. The triangulation of these different approaches (genealogy, network ethnography and hermeneutics) made it possible to draw up the following results.

Expected Outcomes

Referring the above-mentioned questions and objectives, we are able to shows that, also in Italy, as already occurred in other countries, the education field is witnessing the raise of ‘a new specialist elite’ (Larner, 2002) of experts, consultants and advisors which is acting as the vehicle for processes of both policy and endogenous privatisation in the education system. And what we are seeing today is the expansion on the arena by ‘new’ knowledge and expertise, where a proliferation of networks’ relations emerges from the ‘civil society’. Also through the availability of financial resources linked to European projects, the policy makers have open – and have been pressured to open, in a policy-network vein of interpretation – access to experts and consultants. A wider horizon provided the opportunity of commissioned research from government interplayed with the emergence of the entrepreneurial university leading to researchers developing consultancy roles, and in partnership with private research agencies (Fitzgerald et. al, 2012). This relevant shift in the policy design provided a fertile terrain for the making of schools and education administrations business-like through the importing of knowledge, technologies and ethics from the private sector and the management and economic disciplines (Ball and Youdell, 2008). This implies a new form of subjectivation of school professionals, whereas ‘professionals who are required to improve student outcome scores generate income streams to fund provision, and lead on school status decisions within or outside of the public governance system’ (Gunter et al., 2014: 3). Even if in Italy the outsourcing of education public system is still limited in comparison with other national system, the penetration of subtle forms of endogenous privatisation is granted through knowledge exchange relationships which are in turn enabled by ‘the introduction of private sector managerialism’ as a lever to modernisation (Gunter et al., 2014: 2).

References

Ball, S. J., Junemann, C., 2012. Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Policy Press. Ball, S. J., Youdell, D., 2008. Hidden privatisation in public education. Brussels: Education International. Fitzgerald, T., White, J., Gunter, H.M., 2012. Hard labour? Academic Work and The Changing Landscape of Higher Education. Bingley: Emerald. Gadamer, H. G., 1976. Hegel's dialectic: Five hermeneutical studies. Yale University Press. Grimaldi, E., Serpieri, R., 2013. Jigsawing education evaluation. Pieces from the Italian new public management puzzle. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45 (4), 306-335. Gunter, H.M., Hall, D., Mills, C., 2014. Consultants, consultancy and consultocracy in education policymaking in England. Journal of Education Policy, 3, London: Routledge, 1-22. Kickert, W., 2007. Public management reforms in countries with a Napoleonic state model, In: C. Pollitt, S. Van Thiel and V. Homburg, eds., New Public Management in Europe: Adaptation and Alternatives. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 26–51. Landri, P., 2014. The sociomateriality of education policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, (ahead-of-print), 1-14. Larner, W., 2002. Globalization, governamentality and expertise: Creating a call centre labour force. Review of International Political Economy, 9 (4), 650-674. Olmedo, A., 2013. From England with love… ARK, heterarchies and global ‘philanthropic governance’. Journal of Education Policy, (ahead-of-print), 1-23. Ricolfi, L., 1997. La ricerca qualitativa. Roma: La nuova Italia Scientifica. Thrupp, M., Willmott, R., 2003. Education Management in Managerialist Times. Beyond the Textual Apologist. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Author Information

Sandra Vatrella (presenting / submitting)

University of Naples, Federico II, Italy

Department of Social Sciences

Napoli

Roberto Serpieri (presenting)

University of Naples, Federico II, Italy, Italy

Emiliano Grimaldi

University Federico II Naples, Italy