Thursday 1 January 2015

continuing professional development - a critique

The British Council has a huge resource on CPD:
CPD | EnglishAgenda | British Council

Here is an evaluation of the impact of CPD:
webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130401151715/http://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/RR659.pdf

There is very little in the way of critical studies of the ideas and approaches behind CPD.

Here are some sections from one critique of CPD:



PANOPTICON OF THE SECOND KIND: SELF-REFORMING DURING THE ERA OF EXCELLENCE

Alexander M. Sidorkin, Rhode Island College Follow


Era of Excellence is a period of educational reforming in the United States from 1980 until now; in all likelihood, it will extend into the future. The name applies to a “generation of educational policies intended to enhance student learning.”1 This paper uses Michel Foucault’s general framework to report on an important innovation in the political economy of power, and suggest possible strategies of resistance.

Roots

What one may call “self-reforming” seems to be the evolutionary trend of the Era of Excellence. Self-reforming is closely related to the family of quality improvement methodologies developed by global industry. Total Quality Management, or TQM is associated with ideas of W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993), although he did not use or like the term.4 Deming worked in Japan in the 50-s and is credited for the remarkable progress in quality control the Japanese industry had made after the World War II. In the 80-s, his ideas became popular in the United States. The TQM movement produced an enormous literature output, to which I refer for further detail. The Federal government became concerned about the quality of American products, and in 1987, has established the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award,5 named after Reagan’s Secretary of Commerce killed in an accident. Finally, there is the International Standards Organization,6 which administers the so-called ISO-9000 series of quality standards.

Essentially, an organization devises its own set of goals, operational practices, and methods of quality control, and then shows to a third party how it carries out these procedures. The modern quality control is an exercise in meticulous, preplanned self-policing. Even more importantly, it is an exercise in designing the self-policing procedures.

A sizeable body of writing in organization theory examines quality control methods within Foucault’s theory of power relations.7 Sewell and Wilkinson8 8 Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson. 1992. 'Someone to Watch Over Me':Surveillance, Discipline and the Just-In-Time Labour Process. Sociology 26(2):271-289. point out that the TQM (for simplicity, I will use this as a generic term for all quality control methodologies listed above) is an extension of Foucault’s Panopticon. It looks like workers get more control over their own work and the organization. In fact, the means of control become less visible, and power more precisely distributed. Surveillance substitutes hierarchy and bureaucracy. Sewell even quotes empirical studies demonstrating that autonomy can coexist with tight control, which seems to be obvious even without the empirical proof.9  [9 Graham Sewell, “The discipline of teams: the control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance.” Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1998, http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m4035/n2_v43/21073410/p1/article.jhtml ]. Indeed, there is something in TQM that reminds Foucault’s notion of disciplines as a technologies of domination: the meticulous self-control, the rationing of small doses of punishment, the impersonal character of submission.

TQM made inroads first in higher, and now in K-12 education. Higher education accreditation procedures more and more rely on the TQM-type methodologies. Consider, for example, this fragment of an accrediting organization’s mission statement: “Through standards that focus on systematic assessment and performance-based learning, NCATE encourages accredited institutions to engage in continuous improvement based on accurate and consistent data.”10 The Baldrige framework, which is defined as “a self-assessment framework in education” is one of the biggest buzzwords in today’s schools, and is actively promoted by several state governments. The relation to business practices is very straightforward an unapologetic. For instance, if you want to write to the Baldrige in Education Initiative, you have to put “C/o National Alliance of Business” in the address.11

However, the ease with which business practices cross over into educational territory is somewhat worrisome. In the Unites States, the policymakers more and more operate under the assumption that there is no significant specificity to the educational sphere. Education is seen as a sphere of social life very similar to industry, and therefore reformable and improvable according to industrial models. Good management, they believe, is good management, quality control is quality control, whether in school or at a manufacturing plant. This idea sounded quite revolutionary in the 20-s and 30-s of the XX century, when the teachings of Frederick W. Taylor made their first impact on American schools. Yet an idea only acquires real power when it no longer sounds revolutionary, and is therefore exempt from questioning. Some believe that ideas are powerful when people pay attention to them. This is not true; the most powerful ideas are ignored by most people because they sound obvious.

Pseudo-empowerment

The key evolutionary trend of the reform is toward delegating the responsibility to states, school districts, and individual schools, in connection with certain procedural controls. The reformers will not or cannot tell schools what to do; they simply provide standards, give or promise funds, and let the educators figure out their own course of actions. On the matters of structural and organizational change, districts and schools are more and more often left alone to decide what is best. In theory, such an arrangement should produce widespread enthusiasm among educational practitioners, which somehow is not happening. The self-reforming is turning out to be neither democratic nor empowering.

The individualized, locally-controlled reforming is not necessarily democratic or liberating. The educational reform debate now seems to concentrate on the forms of accountability (standardized tests versus more “authentic” forms of accountability). Yet I venture to predict that even locally controlled forms of accountability like those proposed by Deborah Meier,12 will not diminish the perverse domination of self-reforming. The theorists of educational reform may have missed the danger of Foucault’s Panopticon.

Thus, the combination of self-reforming and accountability more or less defines the landscape of K-12 educational reforming. Yet, as Elizabeth Ellsworth once famously put it, why doesn’t this feel empowering?16 [16 Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (1989): 297-324]  A short answer is that an important component of self-reforming is the pseudo-empowering, which is a discipline technique based on delegating authority down the hierarchy without changing the nature of that authority.

Let me examine in more detail how the pseudo-empowering works. In 1997, the Ohio General Assembly had required creation of a statewide performance accountability system; hardly an unusual demand in the Era of Excellence. In response, the State Department of Education required all school districts to develop their continuing improvement plans (CIP). To facilitate this process, the Department offers a well-designed web-based interactive tool called iCIP, for interactive Continuing Improvement Plan. Anyone can try it on-line;17 it is fun and easy to use. The tool works like a wizard, which takes you step-by-step through a certain process, while providing help along the way.

We are witnessing an instance of the old confusion of choice with freedom. Pseudo-empowerment relies on an ability of individuals and groups of people to choose. However, the circumstances and limitations of the choice make those who choose less free in their future abilities to choose.

The result of this long process was a multi-page framework, no better and worse than any other, with some changes to scheduling, governance, with a new system of incentives for good students, etc. The crucial difference is that the teachers felt some authorship over this document. In the past, when governments prescribed exactly what to do, teachers could blame the government if the reform went wrong. The forcibly empowered teachers and administrators are given only a multitude of standards, but are free to decide which specific model of reform to undertake. Therefore, if anything goes wrong, they have no one to blame but themselves. They are put in a situation of perpetual guilt. “But you decided on all this yourselves!” – became a leitmotif of the new relationship with authorities. The pseudo-empowerment brings individual conscience into the relationship of power. Instead of ineffective ways of coercion through purely administrative means, we can now shame teachers into the active obedience.

The idea of Panopticon from the beginning relies on some sort of autonomy. According to Foucault, the prisoner does not know whether he is watched, therefore, he gets in a habit of watching himself: “the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment: but he must be sure the he may always be so.”18 It takes an autonomous decision-maker to make a good Panopticon prisoner. Yet now the prisoner gets to design the Panopticon for himself. The ghost of J. Bentham, the inventor of the original Panopticon, now wants every prison, factory, and school to get busy designing the blueprints for their own custom-built panotpicons. Besides watching oneself, the new Panopticon creates a sense of community among the prisoners. The collective body of prisoners becomes the guard; each individual remains a prisoner. Standardized panopticons are out; individually designed are in. The community exerts certain peer pressure, and therefore makes watching almost omnipresent. The prisoners can no longer conspire against the authorities, because the authority belongs to all other prisoners. Why would anyone want such a thing? For three primary reasons: so that each Panopticon fits to specific circumstances; so that it is flexible and constantly perfected, and so that the inmates consider it their own.

Ritual writing

If we believe Charles Taylor,25 the authentic self can be understood as a defense against domination, a sacred inner space where one can be oneself. Foucault argues that the authentic self is created by such practices as confession, and later, psychotherapy.26  [26 Michel Foucault, Care of the Self the History of Sexuality. (Random House, 1988)] His understanding of the self is much bleaker: the self is a part of power relationship. Having a heightened sense of self may mean better, gentler, more efficient domination. The issue is too large for this paper to handle, and both Taylor and Foucault are probably right. Yet the case of ritual writing supports Foucault’s more than Taylor’s. The self indeed blends with the technologies of coercion; the ritual writing of educational reforming is one example of such a blend.

Perpetuation of Change

The idea of continuous improvement represents a significant shift in use of change in power relations. All reforms of modern times were envisioned as last ones… The TQM thinking brought with it the notion of permanent improvement, and of homogeneous time.

The continuous improvement concept does a double trick to the idea of change. It makes the reform an every-day, routine activity, and by doing this, eliminates the reform. It lowers the expectations, but increases effort by spreading it over long time periods. Continuous improvement is an innovation in the tool kit of power relations. Perpetuation of change is trying to put all educational change to an end by appropriating the very notion of change. Within the constrains of the self-reforming model, there is no space for imagination, for inventing something genuinely new, for a quantum leap of any sort. Reform itself has become a mechanism of control. Teachers and school administrators are kept in check by allowing them to change their organizations.

Perpetual change disallows any change at all. Changes are sliced so thin, and spread out in time and space, they lose accumulating effect. The Era of Excellence reform is not a reform at all; it is a large-scale maintenance of the existing educational system. In education, we witness the strange End of History phenomenon, like that predicted by Fukuyama28 for the whole world, but materialized only in American education.

Governments must have reached a conclusion that schools operate close to their maximum capacity at producing an educated workforce. Due to certain intrinsic limitations, which I explored elsewhere,29 they just cannot do much better in the area of training. Yet their normalizing, socializing potential is far from being exhausted. Schools are becoming an intricate and omnipresent technology of power delivery, which assures just-in-time, exact distribution of power. Ladies and gentlemen, progress is over; perpetual perfection of the status-quo has begun.

Resistance

Just like Foucault’s disciplines can never create a perfectly docile human body, the self-reforming can never produce a perfectly docile social body of a school. My worry about the self-reforming is that it somehow changes the balance between administrative reforming and teacher resistance.

Foucault on many occasions noted that power cannot be viewed as pure evil; it simply is an evolving function of society. Every page of Discipline and Punish is marked by a paradox; on one hand, Foucault incessantly shows his disdain of the manipulative technologies of power; on the other hand, he maintains the voice of an objective analyst. My graduate students sometimes confuse his irony with his own voice. He looks for logic, efficiency, and even certain “naturalness” of the power evolution process. Writing his books was an act of resistance in its own right. Seeing the invisible mechanisms of power makes those mechanisms less effective. The resistance is thus an important component of the social ecology, whether it is successful or not. In other words, I am not sure if I wish the efforts of self-reforming to fail. But I am absolutely sure that these efforts cannot go unexposed, and unresisted. As long as school teachers and administrators resist the self-reforming, there is hope and a future. There is no such a thing as futile resistance; those who resist can never be fully controlled.

The most effective forms of resistance I had a chance to observe involve playing the game of self-reforming, but also high jacking the game, manipulating its rules to serve what the teachers believe is right in education. What I call “the subversive resistance” deserves a special paper and hopefully, a field study.


.
.
.

No comments: