Transforming the identity of head teachers in Catalonia through New Public Management assessment
Author(s):
Jordi Collet (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

23 SES 12 A, Policy Reforms and Teacher Professionalism

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-25
09:00-10:30
Room:
K4.02
Chair:
Polychronis Sifakakis

Contribution

This communication focuses on how neoliberal school policies are being enacted in Catalonia and the effect they have on head teachers’ practices, subjectivity and identity. I try to analyse the complex, often incoherent and uncertain connexion between Neoliberalism with a capital "N" (Ong 2007), as a global process related to market freedom, competition, depoliticisation, assessment or accountability, and neoliberalism with a small "n". That is, how global processes are being enacted as a particular technology of governing "free" head teachers and how this technology is reshaping and producing new truths, practices, relationships and professional identities. It begins by considering the impact of global neoliberal policies on educational practices and techniques of governing, in particular the techniques through which head teachers are valued and understood ‘by numbers’ (Ozga and Grek 2008; Grek 2009; Ball 2015), at a distance (Rose and Miller 2010) and through New Public Management technologies like market, competition, bureaucracy and so forth. (Salhberg 2011; Verger and Curran 2014).  Rather than adopting the traditional perspective on neoliberal policies as being the result of a ‘retreat of the state’, it highlights the ‘positive and productive’, in a Foucauldian sense, effects on education and, specifically, on head teachers. So governance, assessment, school-based management, flexibility, performance-related pay and auditing, among other elements, are "positive" techniques of government, in the technical, not ethical sense of the word. Because enacting reforms is also about the de-construction of one professional identity and the re-construction of a new one. Through the "regime of numbers" (Ozga and Lingard, 2007; Ozga, 2013; Ball, 2015) and their techniques of assessment, monitoring, classification and competition, the whole school conduct is conducted. Thus through school assessment, a model of (head) teachers, pupils or family is produced, made calculable and subject to the power of numbers, while at the same it produces resistance.

Coming from a Catalan school culture quite susceptible to any kind of assessment, during the 2000s, and especially driven by the new hegemony of PISA, assessment has changed its own "status" and now the Catalan government is today speaking about the "assessment school culture"(Bonal and Tarabini 2013; Bonal and Verger 2014). It is precisely this current wave of "global school assessment", related to an increasing degree of school autonomy, new forms of school organisation and greater accountability, that places head teachers as the cornerstone of new school governance. They are becoming the main and almost sole people responsible for school assessment results and for the school innovations designed to improve these assessment outcomes. This is not done explicitly but rather through assessment undertaken in a context of freedom, in relation with transparency and especially an increasing of "total responsibility" on the side of the head teachers and, as Ball puts it (2003, 215) "the novelty of this epidemic of reforms is that it does not simply change what people, as educators, scholars and researchers do, it changes who they are". From this perspective, the goal of the communication is to analyse how a concrete model of school assessment becomes the key policy technology when promoting changes in school governance and which are the main changes related to head teachers’ views, practices and identity. 

Method

Having examined neoliberal policies, it then takes a more micro approach through qualitative research. Four in-depth interviews to head teachers were done in order to understand how neoliberal governance has affected their practices, their conceptions, their role, their subjective reactions and their (professional) identity. The four head teachers were selected following a number of different criteria. First, they were chosen from schools linked to my own university, in which students studying to be primary school teachers do their practices. Second, two were men and two women, thus providing a gender balance. Third, they were of different ages, two around 40 years old and two around 60, and had a different amount of experience as head teachers. Fourth, the head teachers were chosen from both state (3) and grant-aided schools (1). Fifth, I sought schools whose students and families were from different backgrounds. All four schools were situated in semi-urban areas (between 40,000 and 70,000 inhabitants) and in the province of Barcelona. The number of schools (4) was decided in relation to exploratory research designed to begin to analyse the introduction of neoliberal assessment in, and its impact on Catalan schools. It is evident that this exploratory research is too limited to shed full light on, or properly understand, the processes, diversity and development around this topic. The discourse analysis of head teachers’ interviews drew on Foucault’s perspective and aspired “to dissect, disrupt and render the familiar strange by interrogating”. As Luke (1999) put it, language works not only to produce meaning but also particular kinds of objects and subjects upon whom and through which particular relations of power and knowledge are realised. This was the aim of the interviews’ analysis: to identify the development and relations of different axes of power and knowledge with the production of a new identity and new practices of the head teachers of the school through the concrete functioning of a new model of assessment in education centres. The focus was on analysing the discourse underlying these transformations or “to reveal and undermine what is most invisible and insidious in prevailing practices”.

Expected Outcomes

On one side, some Head Teachers (HT) they feel uneasy about these new assessment measures and all their implications (more applications to fill in, more requests for information, more time and energy focused on bureaucracy and control, and so on.). But, on the other side, these same head teachers change their conduct and puts new assessment model at the heart of their head teacher project. It is into and through this new policy ensemble that include market, management, and so on that some HT governs themselves and others. These changes are also related to performativity as a culture (Ball 2003): The new assessment measures are producing a "subtle but decisive" modification in Head Teachers’ subjectivity, in their own perspective, feelings and identity. As one of them put it: "I feel that the new assessment is an opportunity for school improvement and improvement has to be done through these norms. We have obtained a good pupil inscription!". From some HT perception, there is no other option but to accept this new assessment model that guides the behaviour of the school and the teachers. Meanwhile other HT, due to their own age, power resources, positions, experience and personal contacts, are able to take what could be called "ironic distancing" against the assessment measures and this new wave of school reform. If power is "productive", more than being "resistant" to the SIS in a heroic or war sense, I believe these HT can express themselves in different ways. Otherwise than the first, they feel they can play a different card game with their own cards. Finally, the communication exposes that head teacher could release democratic and open processes of awareness and questioning personal and collective truths, forms of government and subjectivities and, through these, resistance and refusal, self-constitution and care practices in alternative ways (Collet and Tort 2016).

References

Ball, S.J. 2003. "The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity." Journal of Education Policy 18 (2): 215–228. Ball, S.J. 2015. "Education, governance and the tyranny of numbers." Journal of Education Policy 30 (3): 299-301. Ball, S.J., and A. Olmedo. 2013. "Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities." Critical Studies in Education 54 (1): 85-96. Bonal, X., and A. Tarabini. 2013. "The role of PISA in shaping hegemonic educational discourses, policies and practices: the case of Spain." Research in Comparative and International Education 8 (3): 335-341. Bonal, X., and A. Verger. 2014. L'agenda de la política educativa a Catalunya. Una anàlisi de les opcions de govern (2011-2013). Barcelona: Fundació Jaume Bofill. [The education policy agenda. An analysis of the government options] Burchell, G. 1996. "Liberal government and the techniques of the self." In Foucault and political reason. Edited by A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N.S. Rose, 19–36. London: UCL Press. Collet, J., and A. Tort. (coords.). 2016. "La gobernanza escolar democrática". Madrid: Morata. [The democratic school governance] Grek, S. 2009. "Governing by numbers: the PISA 'effect' in Europe.", Journal of Education Policy 24 (1): 23-37 Hunter, I. 1996. "Assembling the school." In Foucault and political reason, edited by A. Barry., T. Osborne, and N.S. Rose, 143–166. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ong, A. 2007. "Neoliberalism as a mobile technology." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, 3–8. Luke, A. 1999. Critical Discourse Analysis. In J. P. Keeves & G. Lakomski (Eds.) Issues in Educational Research. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Ozga, J. 2012. "Governing knowledge: data, inspection and education policy in Europe." Globalisation, Societies and Education 10 (4): 439-455. Ozga, J. 2013. "Accountability as a policy technology: accounting for education performance in Europe." International Review of Administrative Sciences, 79 (2): 292-309. Ozga, J., and B. Lingard. 2007. "Globalisation, education policy and politics." In The Routledge-Falmer reader in education policy and politics, edited by B. Lingard, and J. Ozga, 65–82. London: Routledge. Ozga, J., and S. Grek. 2008. Governing by Numbers? Shaping Education through data. CES Briefing No 44. Edinburgh: Centre for Educational Sociology. Serpieri, R., and E. Grimaldi. 2015. "Leader as Policy Device: The Hybridization of Head Teachers in Italy." ECPS Journal 11/2015 Verger, A., and M. Curran. 2014. "New public management as a global education policy: its adoption and re-contextualization in a Southern European setting." Critical Studies in Education 55 (3): 253-271.

Author Information

Jordi Collet (presenting / submitting)
University of Vic - UCC (Barcelona)
BARCELONA

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