Abstract
This article1 aims to reveal the kind of discourse which now shapes policy and practice, and the negative effect that this discourse has on how teachers have to see their role, marginalising them in major educational decisions and curriculum development.
Keywords
Introduction
For those who do not recognise the origin of the title, it is drawn from that great American philosopher, John Dewey (1897: 80). But you are to be forewarned. To some he was ‘the saviour of American education’. To others, however, who felt that he had substituted socialisation for true education, he was seen to be ‘worse than Hitler’. How can teachers, the high priests, prophets and usherers in of the Kingdom of God possibly be worse than Hitler?
Perhaps the clue lies in the concerns of this conference – the dominance of particular discourses and the exercise of power through such discourses. For the overall theme of the conference is to show the social, economic, political and cultural forces which shape education policy and practice, and in doing so – in revealing these for what they are – to ‘enable silenced and marginal voices to be heard’. One such voice, I maintain, is that of the teacher.
Therefore, my contribution to the conference is: first, to reveal the kind of discourse which now shapes policy and practice; second, to illustrate the effect on how teachers have to see their role – making them a silenced and marginal voice; third, come in John Dewey!
The discourse shaping policy and practice
Currently, in England, teaching is frequently referred to in government documents as ‘delivering the curriculum’ – a curriculum devised elsewhere (not part of the teacher’s job).
The tone was set in England by the Labour Government’s White Paper, 21st Century Schools: Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future: Building a 21st Century Schools System (DCSF, 2008). As the Children’s Minister declared: It is fundamentally a deep cultural change. It is about changing boundaries of professional behaviour and thinking in a completely different way.
So, what are the clues to the ‘deep cultural change’ which creates new ‘boundaries of professional behaviour’?
This ‘deep cultural change’, as outlined, said nothing about education, but the language gave the clue. ‘Performance’ and ‘performing’ were mentioned 121 times, ‘outcomes’ 55 times, ‘delivery’ 57 times. Libraries get no mention in the 21st-century schools, and books only one – namely, in the section on Information Technology. The following statement sums it up perfectly: It is only the workforce who can deliver our [i.e. the Government’s] ambition of improved outcomes.
So, the teacher (or, to use the new terminology, ‘the workforce’) is a ‘deliverer of improved outcomes’ or a trainer of those who have to hit targets – not the thinker of what those outcomes might be. As Peter Abbs so well describes the situation we are in: teachers become the technicians of subjects, not the critical guardians of a long culture; nor the midwives of the creative potentialities of living children. (Abbs, 2004: 4)
Indeed, teachers become increasingly redundant, as Information Technology systems ‘deliver the product’ more cheaply and effectively.
Here we see the parallels and connections between what is happening in the USA and what is happening in England. Mr Murdoch’s NewsCorp bought Wireless Generation. This computer company produces the software that, it is claimed, can replace textbooks and indeed aid teachers. It also provides ARIS – Achievement Reporting and Innovation Systems – which can track student attendance, grades and progress, and which has been bought by New York schools. Rupert Murdoch hired Joel Klein, once superintendent of New York schools, to help him expand into education and then to superintend Wireless Generation. It is perhaps not coincidental that the meetings between Mr Murdoch and Mr Gove, Secretary of State for Education (reinforced by meetings between Gove and Klein, both members of ‘Atlantic Alliance’ before the last general election) were said to be mainly about education rather than the problems of phone hacking. According to Rupert Murdoch, interviewed in The Times: You can get by with half as many teachers by using his computers. (see Wighton, 2011)
The ‘new proletariat’ referred to by Peter Abbs is the modernised teaching profession, reshaped to deliver the curriculum and to be assessed in terms of productivity, where that product is the measurable output.
Therefore, that description of teaching now has to be understood within a broader discourse of ‘performance indicators’ and ‘audits’, ‘inputs’ related to ‘outputs’, ‘target-setting’ and ‘efficiency gains’. Schools are increasingly run by ‘Chief Executives’ (the title of ‘head teacher’ is not grand enough or does not convey the essentially management role), or indeed by the Chief Executives of the Academy Chains, with their own targets and inspectorate to which the schools belong. These work through ‘line managers’ with teachers ‘delivering’ the goods to the ‘consumers’ according to agreed ‘targets’. Teaching therefore comes to be understood in the light of a particular form of life, for how we understand the social and moral world in which we live is shaped by the language through which it is described, explained and valued (as George Orwell so clearly demonstrated). And that ‘form of life’ profoundly affects the role, training and continuing professional development of teachers: Within such a ‘form of life’, an industry has been created. Testing has swollen out of all proportion. So much hangs on the results of tests as they appear in the public league tables (for example, parental choice, head teachers’ pay, teachers’ promotion, school closure, enforced academisation).
It should be noted, however, that this increasing emphasis on explicit management procedures and structures has been by no means confined to the teaching profession. There have emerged in the last few decades radical changes in the management of public services and thus of the professionals running those services (universities, the health service, the probation service, social work, prisons and so on). Recently an injured person in the middle of Oxford had to wait over half an hour for an ambulance, which finally came from distant Aylesbury. The reason? All the spare local ambulances were queuing for hours outside Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital so that the sick persons they contained would be admitted only when their waiting time in the hospital would be less than four hours, thereby enabling the Accident and Emergency Department to meet its targets.
The result is two-fold
First, there is what is referred to as ‘gaming’, focusing upon meeting targets irrespective of how such focusing distorts the nature and purpose of the activity. The French private company ATOS, brought in to assess the claimants for welfare benefits as to their fitness for work, were contracted to meet targets in order to receive their remuneration. That resulted in many (40%) being declared fit who, on appeal (and at great additional expense to the tax payer) were seen to be unfit.
Second, there are burgeoning bureaucracies which themselves need to be managed, and therefore a need for the management skills and know-how which go much beyond the professional knowledge required for good teaching, medical care, etc. Was ‘local management of schools’, introduced by the 1988 Education Act, such a good thing, changing what were referred to as head teachers into managers of complex financial and administrative organisations, with much less time and opportunity to ‘usher in the Kingdom of God’?
As an illustration of this shift in the underlying understanding of public institutions, one might refer to the change in language and practices in universities, following the ‘efficiency review’ of the Jarratt Commission, established by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors (CVCP, 1985): The crucial issue is how a university achieves the maximum value for money consistent with its objectives. (2.12) Each department should maintain a profile of ‘indicators of performance’ to include standing costs of space, utilities (telephones, etc), market share of applications, class sizes, staff workloads, graduation rates and classes of degrees. (3.33) A range of performance indicators should be developed, covering both inputs and outputs and designed for use both within individual universities and for making comparisons between institutions. (5.4) The headships of departments … ideally should be both a manager and an academic leader. (4.27)
The shift in the control and management of public services, eventually by Government (for example, in the case of schools, in the creation of a National Curriculum), which emerged in the 1980s, was explained in a series of Government White Papers from HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office: Modern Public Services in Britain: Investing in Reform (Cabinet Office, 1988, Cm 4011); Public Services for the Future: Modernisation, Reform, Accountability (Her Majesty's Treasury, 1998, Cm 4181); The Government’s Measures of Success: Outputs and Performance Analyses (Her Majesty's Treasury, 1999); Modernising Government (Cabinet Office, 1999, Cm 4310).
One important consequence of these White Papers (and thus of the ‘modernisation’ of public services) was what was referred to as ‘public service agreements’. These were agreements over funding from Her Majesty's Treasury, first to Departments of State in terms of overall targets, which were then ‘cascaded down’ in more precise forms, to the institutions that were under the responsibility of the respective Departments. In education, this was spelt out partly in terms of the proportion of students at different schools achieving so many GCSEs at different grade levels. But this gradually emerges as a way of rewarding teachers through ‘performance related pay’. There is, then, a sharp division (which previously did not exist) between the ends or aims of education (established in precise outcomes) and the means of ‘delivering’ those outcomes, viz. the pedagogical skills in which the teachers are experts.
It is important to be aware of this. Too often the increase in the dominance of management language and structures in schools and universities is not seen within this wider context of the so-called reform of public services as a whole, and of the consequent ‘public service agreements’, nor within the philosophical influences which underpinned those reforms, to which I now turn.
The theoretical underpinning of these changes (which had slowly developed in education since the introduction of ‘local management of schools’ in 1988) became more explicit (at least for the writer of this article) at a seminar in Oxford in the mid-1990s, which was led by the then Permanent Secretary at the DfEE. He promoted what he referred to as the ‘quality circle’, in which we were to think much more in business terms. This required first the explicit statement of educational aims. From these one derives precise objectives or targets. To achieve these objectives one needs to select the content and teaching methods that could be shown empirically to attain those targets. (Successful teaching is a science.) Then follows assessment – the measurement of what has been achieved in relation to those objectives. Finally, there is evaluation of the whole process. If the assessment showed that the targets had not been hit, then either the targets were not the right ones or the means of hitting them (content or teaching methods) were ineffective. Hence, in the light of the evaluation, there is revision, and the virtuous circle is even more virtuous and the process can start again. At roughly the same time, there was a series of seminars at St John’s College, Oxford, on what was referred to by Mark Freedman as ‘re-inventing government’ (see Faulkner et al., 1990). These reforms of the management of public services, so that they would be run on much the same way as private businesses, was spelt out by civil servants and other architects of the reforms.
That attempt to ‘re-invent government’ led to the invitation of two Americans, Allan Odden and Carolyn Kelly, by David Blunkett, when he was the Secretary of State for Education and Skills (DfES). Their book was entitled Paying Teachers for What they Know and Can Do (1997), which influenced the ‘performance management’ of teachers, as that came to be perceived by government (performance thresholds, fast-track teachers, inspection programmes to ensure ‘value for money’, and greater focus in initial training upon practical skill for achieving nationally set standards of competence).
Odden and Kelly argue that the traditional way of paying and rewarding teachers is outdated. A more business-oriented model is required. As they argued: The tax-paying public, the business community, and policy makers still pressure the education system to produce results and to link pay – even school finance structures, more broadly – to performance. (Odden and Kelly, 1997: 11)
This pressure arises from the felt need to ‘raise standards’, to ‘improve productivity’ in relation to these standards, to make teachers ‘more effective’ and to hold teachers accountable for their professional work. To enable this to happen, there needed to be much greater precision in what teachers were expected to achieve, sometimes referred to as ‘productivity targets’. There needed to be clear statements of ‘standards’ against which the ‘competence of teachers’ might be judged. All this adds up to a new vision for the profession.
In that vision, there was a direct link between the ‘target’ (or ‘measured performance’) of the learner, on the one hand, and the ‘performance’ of the teacher, on the other. But what is meant by ‘performance’? It generally refers to those ‘behaviours’ that can be observed and measured. They are the targets that the target-setters (the civil servants reflecting the wishes of the politicians) decide upon and ‘cascade down’ to ‘chains of academies’ or local authorities, thence to the schools, thence to the teachers. They require a ‘standardisation’ of what is to be produced. The government, at intervals, announces the performances required of teachers in terms of the performances required of pupils (measured in examination grades at different stages of their schooling) or in percentage increase in student performance.
The ‘new vision’ promoted by Odden and Kelly included ‘improving leadership’ through extended pay scales that rewarded ‘strong and effective leaders’, namely, head teachers, members of their management teams and advanced skills teachers. Fixed-term contracts would link rewards to the achievement of agreed objectives.
In similar vein, the Department for Education and Employment commissioned a further consultation document, from private sector management consultants (Hay McBer, 2000), at the cost of £3 million (worth now approximately £6 million) on what makes an effective teacher ‘within a framework of professional development’.
Effect on how teachers see their role
The vision of Hay McBer and of Odden and Kelly, as discussed, assumes a distinctive form of discourse through which to describe, assess, evaluate and thus (in the words of the conference) shape: ‘educational policy and practice’ and thus professional engagement within it, the Orwellian language of ‘targets’ and ‘performances’ (expressed behaviourally), ‘performance indicators’, ‘audits’ of those performances, teachers as effective ‘deliverers of those targets’, and learners as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’. Such a language provides a different way of understanding learning and thereby of teaching. There is a metaphorical drawing upon the language of the business world – except it soon no longer was metaphorical. Professional judgement and development take on different meanings. Previous standards of professional judgement are replaced by externally imposed standards. And so, teachers and their ‘managers’ perceive what they are doing differently.
Within such a ‘form of life’, testing has swollen out of all proportion. So much hangs on the results of tests as they appear in the public league tables (for example, parental choice, head teachers’ pay, teachers’ promotion, school closure, designation as Specialist Schools, even the occasional knighthood) that, increasingly, much time and effort is spent preparing students for them.
Schools, because of the publication of scored performances and the consequent ranking in terms of those published performances, inevitably (rather like the A and E Department at the hospital and rather like ATOS in maximising the number of benefit claimants declared ‘fit for work’) make decisions not entirely in terms of professional judgment and concern, but in terms of productivity, even though this might not coincide with the educational judgment and values. A comprehensive school in Telford, for example, by making all 16 year-olds take a vocational qualification defined as equivalent to four GCSEs, shot up the league table with a 100% attainment of five GCSEs graded A to C. The head teacher was rewarded with a knighthood. Later when, in the light of the HMI report and also the Wolf Report on vocational qualifications (DfE, 2011), these particular qualifications were deemed not to be equivalent to four GCSEs, the school shot down the league table.
Recently it became apparent that an Academy in Oxford, which prided itself on the rapid improvement in the percentage gaining five GCSEs graded C to A, had removed those pupils most likely to fail (26 in number) from the school roll – as indeed had been the practice with other schools in the Academy chain. It is called ‘gaming’. Others would call it cheating. What it cannot be called is the pursuit of educational values for all young people.
More worrying, however, is the immense self-deception – the way in which, in adopting a particular form of discourse, those in charge of educational policy (and as a result, those in schools and other public services) do not see how this is a distortion of those public services. Changed language has changed ‘reality’. For example, the Government introduced a ‘National Strategy’ for secondary schools, a main task of which was to improve the ‘outputs’ as measured in tests. Advisors were appointed from Capita (a for-profit company) to oversee the Government’s drive to improve standards. The Invitation to Negotiate (the contract that Capita won and which was part of the Public Service Agreement targets) stated the purpose of the National Strategies: The ultimate objective of the National Strategy is to make improvements in the practice of teaching and learning in the classroom, and through these improvements to raise pupils’ attainments as measured by national curriculum tests.
The central purpose of the contract was to increase the test attainment of pupils (see Mansell, 2007: 11).
To this end, the National Strategy provided a 328-page pamphlet giving teachers ‘booster classes’, aimed at pupils at age 14 who were seeking to reach Level 5 in English. This showed ‘exactly how teachers should gear their teaching to the precise requirements of the tests’. It provided 14 areas of competence central to the marking scheme, the characteristics looked for at Level 5, the things to memorise crucial to the assessment. And this refers to but one particular group within one Key Stage in one subject!
The consequence has been a devotion to test practice. Typical of the many teachers interviewed by Mansell (2007) was the following: I don’t feel my Year 9 have learnt anything of value this term. I have done practice reading papers, writing papers, targeted writing for writing papers, and put immense pressure on them.
In this devotion to ‘high stakes testing’ this country is following the example of the United States, so well described and criticised by Diane Ravitch (2010). It is also seen by the excellent Smith Report (2004), Making Mathematics Count, as the cause of poor understanding of mathematics, even by those who scored high in the tests for which they had been prepared. There is a linguistic confusion of targets with educational standards.
High priest and usherers in of the Kingdom of God
It was partly against a background such as this – what he referred to as ‘traditional learning and the transmission of knowledge’ – that John Dewey argued vigorously for the central role of teachers as the custodians of what he referred to as ‘the wisdom of the race’, or what others have referred to as ‘the goal of human completeness’, or what Peter Abbs, already quoted, referred to as ‘the critical guardians of a long culture’. The teacher is willy-nilly guided to the awareness that there is a human nature, and that assisting its fulfilment is his or her task.
Perhaps all this is most eloquently put by the head teacher of the American High School whom I met when visiting Lawrence Kohlberg’s Centre for Moral Development at Harvard. Each year she sent this letter to her new teachers: Dear Teacher I am the survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and children shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important but only if they serve to make our children more human.
So important was this role of the teacher – in enabling the young learner to participate in that conversation – that Dewey condemned what passes for education in his native country, namely, the ‘transmission of knowledge’, the learning of facts which lacked understanding, which did not enhance their experience (a key notion for Dewey), and, if anything, led to boredom. Far from education, it closed the mind, did not enrich the thinking. But his desire to change that, to enable young people to think, to extend and enlighten experience, to engage critically with current ideas made him, in the eyes of the establishment, ‘worse than Hitler’.
This distinctive moral perspective of teaching (that is, addressing, in the light of the culture we have inherited, what it means to be and to become, human) is illustrated in the work of a teacher, Fiedl Brandejs. Visitors to Prague should enter the ancient synagogue, now a museum to the victims of the holocaust. They will see some remarkable poetry and paintings of children aged 10–16, very few of whom were to survive. The children had been deported to Terezina, a garrison town about 50 km from Prague. The conditions were appalling, and there was a daily coming and going of prisoners – to destinations which could only be guessed at. Fiedl Brandejs managed to keep the children together in a makeshift schoolroom. A brilliant art teacher, she insisted upon high standards of technique, perspective and use of colour. Art had standards, and these had to be rigidly applied. These children saw what the adults did not see: butterflies outside the windows, rainbows in the sky, green fields beyond the gates, merry-go-rounds on which children played, dinner tables for family and friends, autumn leaves blown by the wind.
Contrast, however, these paintings with their poetry. This gave a different picture; of fear, sadness, unbelief at the inhumanity of their conditions: For seven weeks I’ve lived in here Penned up inside this ghetto But I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don’t live in here, In the ghetto. (Friedmann, 1942)
The human spirit grew through their poetry and painting. These embodied that struggle to make sense of their situation and their lives. That was made possible by a teacher who did not see herself to be doing anything other than being a teacher. She was, through the medium of the arts, enabling those young people to make sense, to refine their feelings, to embody the human emotions of hope and sadness, love and fear. She remained an educator to the very end, and this educative achievement was extended to all. There were no grades for the best poem or painting. There were none rejected as uneducable. Each person’s work was a struggle to understand, helped by a teacher who was able to draw upon the resources of art and poetry at her command.
Recently the English Ballet Company persuaded over a hundred young people (mainly those who had been excluded from schools or were in problem situations) to take part in a ballet – Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet. It was a resounding success. And why not? As the Chairman of the Arts Council said, the ballet had everything – street crime, fights, gang warfare, dysfunctional families. Emma, who took the part of Lady Capulet, when asked what it had meant for her, said that it had transformed her life – she now understood her mum. Three years later I met the manager of the English Ballet Company, and he said that all those young people were gainfully employed, particularly in the arts and allied technology.
Few in England have now heard of the Bullock Report, A Language for Life (DES, 1975). Much of it was influenced by the work of James Britton and his colleagues at the London Institute of Education. It was a call to teachers of English to see the indispensable role of language for young people as they came to understand their own humanity and the society in which they were growing up. The emphasis on speaking and listening (where ‘the pupils’’ own exploratory talk was central and where their narratives and poetry found a place in journals they produced) stands out starkly in the world where academic prowess is assessed almost entirely through success in the proliferating tests. The National Association of Teachers of English became missionary in the promotion of social understanding through the medium of English – spoken as well as written, listening as well as speaking, There was a deep commitment to education for all, to ‘pupil talk as a valuable means of learning’ and to the teacher as the key agent in that mission.
The teacher within this tradition is not the ‘deliverer’ of government or business directives, but is the custodian (often in opposition to such directives) of the values, embedded in the culture we have inherited, through which we have a vision of what Allan Bloom (1987) referred to as ‘human completeness’. The teacher is there to preserve and pass on that vision of human achievement in knowledge, understanding, aesthetic appreciation and practical creativity. In the words of Michael Oakeshott, ‘man [sic] is what he learns to become: this is the human condition’ (see Fuller, 1989: 1).
Similarly, Bruner (1966) identified three questions which, he argued, should shape the social studies curriculum. What makes us human? How did we become so? How might we become more so? This distinctively moral role of the teacher is crucial in a liberal society, supporting a critical tradition based on evidence and argument, drawing on ‘the best that has been thought and said’ whereby young learners might be liberated from those powerful forces (politicians, snake-oil sellers).
There is a second aspect of Dewey I must refer to. It is that intrinsic link between education (as he conceived and argued for it) and democracy – the kind of community in which people, whatever their social background, could live distinctively human and flourishing lives. Such communities do not ‘just happen’. They arise from shared values, from being inducted into distinctive modes of living, from learning not just to tolerate differences, but (more important) to gain in understanding and respect from those differences. In this, the school, and thus the teachers, played an essential, transforming role.
I have witnessed this recently in a primary school that had placed the nurturing of caring at the centre of its programme. The whole school embodies the values implied in caring for each other – pupil for pupil, teachers for the pupils and each other, the school for the parents of the pupils. A class of 10-year-olds were gathered together for a weekly sharing of their problems and their reactions to them. The school was in one of the most disadvantaged districts of England. Of the class of 30, 11 were on the social services’ ‘at risk’ register. The father of one boy had recently been murdered on the nearby estate. However, over the last couple of years they had learnt the rules for engaging in discussion (dialogue): only one person at a time (he or she who holds the ball); nothing hurtful of another in the group to be allowed; everyone to listen to what each says; none forced to speak, though everyone has the opportunity to do so. It was crucial to have developed a safe environment in which each could speak honestly about what he or she thought and felt. They were talking about events in their lives that they had found hurtful. Some spoke of bullying. One spoke of the anger of her stepfather who had confined her to her bedroom. Discussion was of how one felt, how to deal with one’s feelings, how to manage the situation. The courage in engaging in such personal exposure and the caring reactions of the others were quite remarkable.
This was a school and a community of teachers that saw beyond the targets set by government, beyond the league tables, beyond the so-called academic achievement. It had created a civilised community from which would come the citizens of the future. Those teachers truly were the ‘usherers in of the Kingdom of God’.