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
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.
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