Reclaiming What Is Practical, Personal and Implicit in the Idea Of
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Beyond managerial rhetoric: reclaiming what is practical, personal and implicit in the idea of educational accountability Jane Green A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Institute of Education, University of London 2007 ABSTRACT The starting-point of this thesis is a wide spectrum of concerns relating to the detrimental effects which 'new public management' (NPM) and the managerialism it creates have had on education, its organization, its conduct and its content. Pursuing these concerns, Part I of the thesis aims: (i) to establish the ideological and coercive nature of managerialism. Drawing on neo-liberalism in order to articulate its own rhetoric, managerialism has emerged as an ideology in its own right, requiring all who work in the public sector to conform to its own 'managerial' ends; (ii) to demonstrate the philosophical unpersuasiveness of the idea that explicitness-transmitted through a rhetoric of 'transparency'-is the sine qua non for public accountability. Part II explores why the ideology of managerialism is inimical to moral agency. A neo-Aristotelian model of practical rationality is introduced to show how an agent's decision-making, if it is to aim at virtuous ends in the public interest, depends on (i) a structure of reasoning analogous to that which phronesis suggests and on (ii) the practical, personal and implicit knowledge drawn from the agent's 'formation' (ethismos, Bildung). The Aristotelian perspective provides insights for policy-makers concerned with educational accountability: a public rationality that offers a more robust concept of professional and civic responsibility-responsibLeness-than any that managerialism promotes. Part III attends to the objection that no intrinsic value attaches to the idea of implicit ('tacit') knowledge: far better to codify it. An argument, resonating with this idea, to show that practical knowledge-'know-how' can be reduced without residue to explicit propositional knowledge is rejected. The thesis draws to its conclusion by arguing that managerialism, with its emphasis on explicit, pre-specified objectives designed to gauge agent accountability, undermines (paradoxically) the pre-conditions under which trustworthiness and public spirit may play their part in organizational life. 2 Table of Contents Statement of originality and word count 5 Acknowledgements, 6 Introduction 7 Part I: Starting-points: ideas, ideals and ideologies Chapter 1 From concern to doubt, from doubt to critique 24 Chapter 2 Ideology and ideologies: elective affinities 45 Chapter 3 The lure of the explicit: managerial modes of accountability and the ideal of transparency 72 Part II: Practical Judgement Chapter 4 Responsibility and Accountability 100 Chapter 5 Accountability, answerability and the virtue of responsibleness: sketch of a neo-Aristotelian model of practical rationality 124 Chapter 6 A neo-Aristotelian model of practical rationality: ethical formation and practical judgement 142 Part III: End-points: ideas, ideals and ideologies Chapter 7 Return of the lure of the explicit: 'making the implicit explicit' 163 (Patt 1) Chapter 8 Return of the lure of the explicit: 'making the implicit explicit' (Part 2) 186 Chapter 9 Public trust and accountability: What public? Whose trust? Which accountability? 211 Conclusion 241 Appendices and Bibliography: see next page 3 Appendix 1 Situating the demand for educational change in the politics and economics of the time 253 Appendix 2 The rise of corporate professionalism, the costs of management consultancy and the extravagance of some managerial initiatives 268 Appendix 3 Longer Notes 276 Bibliography 300 4 Statement of originality I hereby declare that, except where explicit attribution is made, the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Some of the arguments in this thesis draw on articles I have written in the last few years and which have appeared in the following journals:- 'What are we up against?', Prospero (2003), 9 (4), 18-26 'Managerial modes of accountability and practical knowledge: reclaiming the practical', Educational Philosophy and TheOlY (2004), Special Issue: Work-based Leaming, 36 (5), 549-562 'Critique, contextualism and consensus', Journal of Philosophy of Education (2004), Special Issue: Conformism and Critique in Liberal Society, 38 (3), 511-525 Declaration of word count Word count (exclusive of appendices and bibliography): 79,380 words 5 Acknowledgements There are many 1 should mention here, but 1 shall name six people in particular who have played an essential part in the story of how this thesis came to be written. Dr. Graham Haydon, my supervisor, who first introduced me to the notion of implicit ('tacit') knowledge at the time 1 was writing my MA dissertation. When that was completed he encouraged me to embark on new research and extend the argument of that dissertation more fully. 1 wish to acknowledge his consistent, patient support over the years and the attention, care and concern he has shown towards the improvement of my text. Professor Christopher Winch who, in the early days of my research, was prepared to answer so many queries put to him on matters relating to practical knowledge, accountability, autonomy and the notion of Bildung. His knowledge on these matters has been invaluable. Professor Terence McLaughlin for the fruitful conversations 1 had with him about Aristotle. They indirectly helped to shape the argument of this thesis. 1 am thinking in particular of his insistence that the right way to understand the notion of 'pedagogical phronesis' is to model it on ethical phronesis. Miss Margaret Motley, a teacher from many years ago, whose mode of teaching inspired me to study philosophy as an undergraduate. Lastly, my children, Matthew and Rachel, who have put up with years of "I must go and work now". 1 would like to thank them both for the moral support they have given me throughout. 6 Introduction ... Vague and insignificant Forms of Speech, and Abuse of Language, have so long passed for Mysteries of Science; And hard or misapply'd Words, with little or no meaning, have, by Prescription, such a Right to be mistaken for deep Learning ... that it will not be easie to persuade, either those who speak, or those who hear them, that they are Covers of Ignorance ... John Locke (1689) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding I Why write this thesis? As a result of the marketisation of the public sector, a 'corporate' form of governance (Shattock, 2006, p. 35)1_most visible in the universities, but applying also to other educational establishments-has become the predominant model for educational practices. Its rationale, dictating its mode of operation, grounds the idea of what now counts as public accountability: to set clear targets, to develop performance indicators, to measure the achievement of those targets, and to single out, by means of merit awards, promotion or other rewards, those individuals who get "results". 2 Aptly described as a 'market-inspired managerialism' by Padraig Hogan (1995, p. 226), this kind of accountability is also referred to in the literature as 'new public management' (usually abbreviated to NPM: see section IV, below). I question here the widely accepted assumption that this NPM, 'managerial' model of accountability provides the best practical or public rationality for achieving educational accountability. I argue that any careful scrutiny of the underlying rationale of this model will show how and why it 1 The term, governance is used to capture 'various aspects of new public management (NPM), such as deregulation, contracting-out, agentification and privatisation' (Bache, 2003, p. 301). It must not be taken as a synonym for government: see Bache (ibid) and Rhodes (1997), pp. 15,49-51 2 Pollitt, cited in Bottery (2004), p. 87 7 may be expected, paradoxically, to make practices less accountable as well as less educative. In the literature there exist many critiques of managerialism (and in subsequent chapters it will be clear to the reader just how indebted I am to some of them).3 The story I want to tell seeks to get beneath the evidence we see around us of wasted effort, wasted resources and wasted ideals. I try to understand better the relationship between the three ideas I set out as follows: we are in search of a practical rationality that will translate into a public rationality which, in its tum, secures a form of public accountability that deserves our confidence. With that end in view, we shall explore the constraints that are now placed on the practical reasoning of agents who work within the field of education and have to comply with the kind of strategic planning that we discover in 'guidelines' such as the following (from Ofsted): • there is more effective linkage between the performance management of teachers and schools' other planning cycles • objectives are specific with clear and robust success criteria 4 Further on, I shall explore the way in which a quite different kind of practical rationality, one I associate with the work of Aristotle (to be referred to as the 'Aristotelian model', in contrast to the 'managerial model'), might be deployed by agents in their own praxis. This is a form of practical rationality that does not demand of agents that they prove their sense of accountableness by demonstrating that some explicit, pre-specified 'success criteria' have been met. I shall argue that it is precisely the emphasis now placed on explicitness-in the name of transparency and accountability-that is so problematic. The dialectical tension that plays out all the time in a public accountability system-between, on the one hand, that which needs to be articulated or made explicit in order for others to be able to assess or judge the 3 See Appendix 3, note 3 4 Extract from Ofsted (June 2003) Leadership and Management, p. 30 8 worth of our actions and, on the other, the ordinary things in organizational practices which lie beyond complete articulation in the life of educational institutions-is most evident when we try to understand what a practice (such as a teaching practice) is concerned with.