De-Professionalizing Teachers in the Age of Accountability
Teacher/student/activist Cory Steeves has done an important analysis of the discourse of “21st Century” education reform in (De/Re)-Constructing Teachers and Their Work: A Discourse Analysis of British Columbia’s 21st-century Policy Agenda. His work covers a lot of ground and touches on many important areas of education reform. He specifically looks at what is going in his home of British Columbia, but his analysis can be applied to any place touched by neo-liberal educational policy.
A striking example of Steeve’s thesis is his analysis of the de-professionalization of teaching via the attack on public education. He shows that corporate leaders have disproportional weight in policy development- teachers are rarely asked to be involved while corporate leaders are over- represented. Policy makers lean on the influence of corporate business leaders rather than those who actually do the work of teaching. Steeves writes, “My belief that teachers must have meaningful influence over the policies which shape their work is grounded in the awareness that it is teachers not policy makers- who are solely entrusted with the responsibility of ‘enabl{ling} all learners to become literate, to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy, democratic and pluralist society and a prosperous and sustainable economy.’ (B.C. Ministry of Education, 1996, p.. C-13)” If teachers are not involved in the creation of the policy, and yet are held accountable for its results, then clearly this is something that is being done to teachers rather than with them, and thus represents on attack on public education. As Steeves puts it, “I believe that if teachers are not meaningfully influencing policy-level discussions about what constitutes teachers’ work, then public schooling might be seen as under attack, or ‘terrorized’.”
In a recent interview that Steeves held with Dr. E. Wayne Ross, Ross described the language of accountability this way: “Accountability is an economic interaction within hierarchical, bureaucratic systems between those who have power and those who don’t. (It is) a means of dispersing power to lower levels of hierarchical systems. Those who receive power are obligated to ‘render an account’ of accomplishing outcomes desired by those in power. Accountability depends on surveillance and self-regulation. Its power is spectacle that results from accounting. Accountability schemes obfuscate identity of higher authority; De-Professionalizing Teachers in the Age of Accountability | educarenow:
