pseudo-empowerment in education

We need to be aware of the promises of 'learning objectives':
Jay Doubleyou: a critique of learning objectives
Jay Doubleyou: taylorism >>> and education
Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> and learning objectives >>> and the common european framework

Such 'frameworks' appear to allow for an 'individual' approach and to 'empower' both students and teachers, but the point might be more about control:
Jay Doubleyou: foucault's discipline and punish made easier
Jay Doubleyou: schools as 'total institutions'

And the point made in the following piece is that the control mechanisms we see today might feel 'freer' than before, but they are not:

Panopticon of the Second Kind 

Alexander M. Sidorkin

The top-down reform is gradually replaced with… well, another, much more powerful version of top-down reform that has an outward appearance of a bottom-up reform. What one may call “self-reforming” seems to be the evolutionary trend of the Era of Excellence [in American education]. 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)...

For the purposes of this paper, I want to emphasize the self-regulating aspect of these systems. 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. Sewell and Wilkinson8 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.   

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.

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 underlying idea here is a belief that empowering teachers and administrators will know the context better, will be more flexible, and finally, more motivated to implement programs they author. I would like to share such a belief; however one is forced to face the reality of selfreforming. 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...

Right now, the tendency is to allow schools to figure out how exactly they want to change, and provide evidence of improvement. 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? 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...

We are witnessing an instance of the old confusion of choice with freedom. Pseudoempowerment 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. In a sense, this is true for all choices; almost every choice reduces future choices. True empowerment enlarges the scope of possible choices, and should not be too closely tied with an opportunity to choose. Pseudo-empowerment is an act of choice that limits subsequent choices. It is an act of choice that acquires great significance as such, regardless of the content and consequences of choice. There exists a whole range of manipulative technologies that can produce any needed results through careful organization of group choices. I have had an opportunity to witness a school restructuring process, where teachers went through a whole year of seminars, group activities and exercises in order to develop their own vision of restructuring. At every step of the process, they were asked to think, to write down their preferences, to reflect on their own personal experiences and beliefs. Never once did university helpers forced the teachers to do something they did not want to do. It appeared that the very logic of this collective thinking process dictated the next step. Large sheets of paper and color markers brought into a meeting room more often than not set a stage for pseudo-empowerment. 

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.” 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. 

Panopticon of the Second Kind
Panopticon of a Second Kind: Self-Reforming during the Era of Excellence on JSTOR
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