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1 Introduction

The writing and development of this chapter has been influenced by two complementary but unrelated activities, each has a considerable influence on my thinking about the ongoing education and development of teachers. First was reading Diane Ravitch’s (2010) book, and her epiphany “The Death and Life of the Great American School System. At the age of 75 Ravitch has rethought some of her positions about the value of testing regimes and the effectiveness and impact of national school reform initiatives. As a passionate, if not conservative advocate for public education she was increasingly becoming disaffected with the choice movement and the accountability movement. In her own words “As I watched both movements gain momentum across the nation I concluded that curriculum and instruction were far more important that choice and accountability” (Ravitch 2010, p. 12). Sarah Mosel (2010) in her review of The Death and Life of the Great American School System wrote

Ravitch is absolutely right to caution that trying to evaluate teachers solely on the basis of crude standardized tests is too reductive and will likely only alienate the kind of creative, dynamic people the profession hopes to attract in greater numbers. But the question remains: How do we lure more, talented people to the profession and give them – and the many superb teachers who already exist – the support and respect they deserve?

Governments in New Zealand and Australia and elsewhere should take heed of this observation, especially in terms of their seeming addiction to testing regimes to ‘prove quality learning outcomes’ and the challenges they are facing in recruiting talented and committed teachers.

The second input was working with a group of university colleagues on the development of a teaching standards framework for higher education . This project demonstrated the difficulty in defining standards- what you wanted them to do, the challenges in developing a common language that could be understood and enacted across the sector and how you could make these standards acceptable to various stakeholders (government and the universities themselves). In developing these standards we believed that universities had to be proactive- develop the standards ourselves or we would have to live with a bureaucratic formula that served an audit and compliance purpose rather than a development and improvement one. These standards were developed at a time when teaching standards for Australian teachers were also being developed.

These triggers made me reflect on the relationship between accountability, standards and activism; and to consider if it is possible to be engaged in activism in an age of compliance and bureaucratic regulation and what relevance did the development of standards have on the education of teachers – both their initial education and their on-going professional development .

On first thought, accountability, standards and activism appear to be oppositional and of little relevance for teacher education. From a taken-for-granted perspective accountability and standards speak to the bureaucratic control of the activities and practices of teachers and the teaching profession. Activism on the other hand invokes defiance and speaking against bureaucratic strictures – something negative in the minds of many. The question that arises though is such opposition in the best interests of developing a strong and confident teaching profession? For me it is more a question of balance, accountability and trust in the system, which includes teachers, is important. Similarly teachers need to speak out and in so doing make their practices public and transparent which ensures that they are accountable to their students, communities and their peers. Through on-going professional development teachers gain up-to-date discipline and content knowledge as well as the extension of professional capabilities to ensure quality learning outcomes for their students.

In this chapter I argue that issues of accountability and transparency are at the core of an active teaching profession. In particular, I suggest that teachers collectively have a primary responsibility to contribute to public debates about the quality of teaching and the quality of student learning outcomes and should be central to debates about teacher education. To this end, teachers need to have a voice in shaping the form and content of teaching standards and to be actively involved in ensuring that their practices are accountable and transparent. Consequently, the nature of how teachers make judgments about student learning and curriculum design and delivery needs to be understood, especially how these judgments rely on the intersection of experience, theory and reflection. A robust and intellectually challenging approach to teachers’ professional growth and learning is fundamental.

The chapter is arranged in three parts – part one deals with the relationship between accountability, testing and standards; part two focuses on teaching standards as mechanisms to ensure accountability, part three indicates how standards and activism need to be included in deliberations about teacher education so that teachers, teacher educators and other stakeholders can work towards complementary ends, namely the development of competent teachers.

2 Accountability, Testing and Standards

Diane Ravitch (2010, p. 224) captures the current policy situation as it relates to testing regimes and accountability in the US. Her comments are equally apposite for New Zealand and Australia and other parts of the world. She argues:

The policies we have been following today are unlikely to improve our schools. Indeed, much of what policy makers now demand will very likely make the schools less effective and may further degrade the intellectual capacity of our citizenry. The schools will surely be failures if students graduate knowing how to choose the right option form four bubbles on a multiple-choice test, but unprepared to lead fulfilling lives, to be responsible citizens, and to make good choices for themselves, their families and our society, (p. 224)

While she is focussing specifically on schools, when you focus on teachers her comments suggest the emergence a teaching profession of compliant technicians. It is important to remember that standards, in their most positive and effective form, are a tool to ensure accountability and to build confidence and trust in the learning outcomes of our students.

2.1 Accountability

A good accountability system must include professional judgement, not simply a test score and other measures of student achievement , such as grades, teachers’ evaluations, student work, attendance and graduation rates (Ravitch 2010, p. 163).

Accountability, like standards, is a concept that is often invoked by politicians when questioning the quality of education and student learning outcomes. Both concepts are defined in different ways in theory and in practice, and applied according to political need and interest. Proponents of the ‘new accountability’ argued that educators could be held accountable by making their work more visible to public scrutiny (Taylor Webb 2005, p. 193). Clearly, accountability is an evocative concept that is all too easily used in political discourse and policy documents because it conveys an image of transparency and trustworthiness. In practice being accountable is seen as a virtue, as a positive quality of organizations or officials (Bovens et al. 2006, pp. 226–227). Moreover, it is expected and demanded by governments and the community alike.

Halstead (1994) distinguishes between two forms of accountability: contractual and responsive. Contractual accountability is concerned with the degree to which educators are fulfilling the expectations of particular audiences in terms of standards, outcomes and results. This form of accountability is based on an explicit and implicit contract and tends to be measurement driven. The factors to be measured are selected to fit perceived preferences and requirements and focus mainly on outcome measures and rely on external scrutiny to achieve its ends. Student test results, literacy and numeracy rates are some examples. Responsive accountability on the other hand, refers to decision- making by educators, more concerned with process than outcomes, and with the stimulating involvement and interaction help to secure decisions to meet a range of needs and preferences and relies on self-regulation to achieve its goals.

Recognising that these forms of accountability have different purposes and outcomes is important as these differences have implications for policy development. The former is particularly evident in regulatory environments, where the intent of government is compliance and control, while the latter is about inclusion and the use of the collective wisdom of the profession to self-regulate practice. At its worst, (contractual) accountability threatens to punish educators through a sophisticated network of surveillance (Taylor Webb 2005, p. 190.) and can lead to what Levitt et al. (2008, p. 16) refer to as ‘accountability overload’. This is the result of inadequate clarity between performance requirements or the contradictory obligations they generate, and is the basis for the criticism proffered by Ravich.

Such regimes can lead to external regulation where the actors (educators) have little agency or where self-regulation does exist it, acts towards a formal form of self-surveillance by teachers and their peers. As a consequence it erodes trust and develops risk adverse dispositions towards practice. Systematic external observation thus becomes part of the taken-for-granted aspect of education practice.

2.2 Standards

Defining the scope and content of standards has been a difficult task. Sometimes there is reference to teacher standards and others teaching standards or teacher professional standards . While these are complementary, there are differences between the two. Teacher standards refer to levels of competence expected of individual teachers, either for entry into the profession or for measuring ongoing performance. The scope and remit of teaching standards is the teaching profession rather than individual teachers.

The issue of standards is neither straight forward nor unproblematic. Mahony and Hextall (2000, p. 30) capture this complexity:

In examining standards it is important to examine them for their clarity, consistency and coherence, as well as the values, principles and assumptions that underlie them. They also need to be examined in terms of fitness of purpose – are they capable of doing the work they are intended to do? And is this consistent with the broader purposes of their institutional setting? Procedurally, standards can be investigated in terms of their establishment and formation, with all the issues of accountability and transparency that this entails. They can also be questioned in terms of the manner in which they are translated into practice and the consequences, both manifest and latent, which follow.

In The New Zealand Teaching Council Report Standards for Teaching: Theoretical Underpinnings and applications (Kleinhenz and Ingvarson 2007) the terms teaching and teacher standards are sometimes used interchangeably. They differentiate between teacher entry standards for certification and standards for accomplished teachers as used by the American National Board for Professional Teaching (NBPTS). Three different types of standards are presented: (1) Standards as professional values which they suggest unite people around shared ideas and values. (2) Standards as measures which make judgements about teacher and student performance. And (3) Content Standards which are used to describe the content and scope of teachers’ work. The Graduating Teacher Standards : Aotearoa New Zealand (undated) is a mixture of content values and practice standards.

Recently the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) (2011) promulgated a set of Professional Standards for Teachers. These Standards identify what is expected of teachers across three domains of teaching: professional knowledge, professional practice and professional engagement and can be applied across a teacher’s career stages – Graduate Teachers, Proficient Teachers, Highly Accomplished Teachers and Lead Teachers. These are essentially content standards – that is, they express in a clear and transparent way what teachers need to know and be able to do. These standards “provide consistent benchmarks to help teachers assess performance, identify further learning requirement a means of identifying and recognising teachers who excel against the national Standards” (AITSL 2011).

For Mahony and Hextall (2000) standards and standards regimes need to be examined within the context of broader education policy and practice, in particular the imperative for more transparency and accountability. The question that needs to be asked is what are underlying assumptions and purposes of teacher standards? For AITSL this answer is, “Because the Standards are explicit and public they allow teachers to demonstrate levels of professional knowledge, professional practice and professional engagement”. The power of standards is “not in the words and sentences they contain, but rather in the scope they offer to build a shared understanding of what it is an accomplished teacher knows and does, and in the processes that sit behind the expression of accomplishment, representing the opening of professional practice to debate, discussion and improvement” (Groundwater Smith and Mockler 2009, p. 59).

In practice , standards may be seen to be an opportunity for governments either to control education activity through the reporting requirements of student learning outcomes and teacher performance or to improve the provision and outcomes of schooling. The former focuses on regulation, enforcement and sanctions to ensure compliance (Sachs 2005). The latter is more focussed on development and improving teacher quality.

Elsewhere (Sachs 2005) I argued that many of the assumptions associated with standard setting are derived from a commonsense and populist approach to education, focussing on minimum levels of achievement in various aspects of practice . Their focus is on defining what teachers should be able to do and what they should know. Such as preoccupation on the technical capabilities of teachers led Groundwater Smith and Mockler (2009, p. 8) to comment “It is our fear that the current standards regimes and the policy contexts out of which they grow have, at their hearts, a desire not to build an understanding of the complexity and nuance of teaching practice or to celebrate the diversity of teachers and learners, but rather to standardise practice, stifle debate and promise the fallacious notion of ‘professional objectivity”. If this is the case then the possibility for an activist teaching profession is significantly reduced.

Earlier I referred to contractual and responsive accountability, aligned with these forms of accountability are two kinds of standards: regulatory and developmental standards (Mahony and Hextall 2000). Regulative standards align with contractual accountability and responsive accountability with developmental standards .

Regulatory standards

Developmental standards

A focus on accountability

A student centred approach to teaching and learning

A technical approach to teaching

Systematic forms of monitoring for the purposes of accountability

Monitoring teacher performance

A view that teachers should be career long professional learners

External imposition of standards by a government instrumentality (Sachs 2005, p. 583)

A commitment to teachers improving their professional knowledge and practice

3 Two Approaches to Standards

Put simply, regulatory approaches focus on performance, as measured through external tests which make claims about the quality of student learning outcomes. Not surprisingly, this approach supports government agendas – tests supposedly provide objective data! We can see this in how governments respond to PISA data and other international benchmarks. Go down a ranking and there are consequences, even if there is a valid explanation for the change. This is the practice of ‘if it moves you measure it’. The problem here though is it is not necessarily an indicator for improvement.

Developmental standards are concerned with improvement, usually of teacher performance and student learning outcomes. They emerge through consultation among various stakeholders and are, in the main, profession led, rather than bureaucratically imposed. They are also context specific, acknowledging that different systems and contexts (inner city, rural, metropolitan, remote etc.) should be considered when making judgements about teacher and student performance.

In the current situation with its focus on regulation, the opportunity for teacher professional standards to be a catalyst for authentic professional learning is not being realised. Rather the focus is on compliance and accountability, driven by an administrative rather than a developmental imperative. This has short, mid and long term effects. In the short term it means that teachers and school administrators are often held captive to the short term political rhetoric and interests of a particular government at the time. Failing schools and students give rise to questions about teaching quality and these make for poor headlines, and thus political intervention. It also leads to a compliant teaching profession who are constantly reacting to government fiat. In the mid-term this makes teachers risk-averse, limits decision-making and starts to move towards a ‘teach to the test’ mentality. In the long term it leads to a teaching profession who are timid in their judgements, whose skills are reduced and whose perception in the community is that of technical worker. In this environment the application of standards becomes ritualised to meet the needs of government with the focus on audit and perhaps the next election.

Governments put great store in arguing that standards and quality go hand in hand. Groundwater Smith and Mockler (2009, p. 59) capture the paradox of standards:

Professional teaching standards do not alone and will not ever improve the quality of teaching and learning. Much as a rubric developed to assess student performance on a task is effective not because it captures in a water tight manner what student performance will ‘look like’ at various levels of achievement, but rather because it provides a starting point for making assessment explicit and transparent, so too is it with professional teaching standards.

To this point I have been talking about standards and accountability and how they work in complementary political and practical ways. The matrix below distinguishes between different types accountability and standards regimes in education. It can be seen to be a heuristic that enables us to sharpen our thinking and distinguish the relationship between standards and accountability.

figure a

4 Standards and Accountability

  • Quadrant 1 Accountability practices result in the external control of teaching through externally mandated means such as testing regimes and standards protocols. Standards are developed to control the teaching profession through external regulation

  • Quadrant 2 Accountability practices are internally driven and focus on self-regulation. Standards are imposed on the teaching profession through self-regulation

  • Quadrant 3 Accountability practices are internally driven with the interests of teachers and students are the central purpose. Standards are improvement driven and developed by teachers and the teaching profession

  • Quadrant 4 Accountability is externally driven but moderated by a degree of agency through participation on the part of teachers and students. Standards are developed by government with improved professional practice as the outcome.

If the aspiration is to bring activism, accountability and standards together then quadrant 3 best describes what this would look like. However, I am not so naive to assume that this can be achieved easily. Clearly different interest groups (governments, teachers’ unions and professional associations and teachers themselves) will have different priorities – government bureaucracies would be located in quadrants 1 and 2 while the teaching profession would want to situate itself in quadrants 3 and 4. An activist teaching profession would be located in Q3. I now turn to talk about how activism is positively disruptive strategy which can help to policy makers and teacher educators rethink how teachers are educated and, and a consequence, reposition how teachers work with each other and other interested stakeholders.

5 Activism as a Disruptive Practice

Primarily activism is about change – whether this is social, political, cultural or economic. It is about contesting taken-for-granted assumptions about everyday life, and in the main its focus is on shifting the status quo. At first glance standards and activism would appear to be oppositional. Standards are concerned with regulation while the political project of activism is to work against the grain.

At its core teacher activism should be about building trust in the teaching profession and about having confidence in the practices of competent teachers to produce students who are literate, numerate and able to participate as active and responsible citizens. For Ravitch (2010, p. 224) “the greatest challenge of this generation is to create a renaissance in education, one that goes well beyond the basic skills that have recently been the singular focus of federal activity, a renaissance that seeks to teach the best that has been thought and known and done in every field of endeavour”. While her critique is of contemporary education reform in the US, its focus on testing and ‘supervisory accountability’ can equally be applied elsewhere.

To work against compliance regimes requires courage, which like fairness, honesty, care and practical wisdom is a necessary virtue in teaching (Sockett 1993). As we know principals and teachers work in situations that are often emotionally, physically and intellectually difficult. Their capacity to be resilient and optimistic is often challenged. “It takes courage not to be discouraged when teaching practices must be changed, new curricula absorbed, new rules of conduct met that seem to emphasise bureaucracy at the expense of teaching” (Day 2004, p. 34).

Activism, accountability and professional judgement go hand in hand. Teachers make judgements everyday about the quality of student learning, how to organise learning, and how best to assess this learning. They are involved in conversations about practice with their peers inside and outside of the school and with parents and members of the community. Sometimes the language they use is pitted with education jargon, which at its worse can exclude outsiders, but on other occasions it makes their taken-for-granted assumptions about practice, public and transparent. As a consequence this develops a professional confidence of teachers such that they feel capable and knowledgeable in their capacity to engage in public educational debates. In the context of standards, the standards provide a starting point for discussion of what accomplished professional practice ‘looks like’, p. descriptive as standards might be, they do not at face value convey a quantifiable, replicateable ‘essence of a teacher’ (Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009, p. 59).

The broader project of teacher activism revolves around rethinking professional identity and engagement (Sachs 2003). First and foremost it requires a sustained effort to shed the shackles of the past, thereby permitting a transformative attitude towards the future. It also requires that teachers individually and collectively work towards a positive activist agenda. The compliant technician is not in this picture.

Given that activism is often associated with violence and dissent, what then is an example of successful activism that may help us reposition an activist teaching profession? I have had an interest in the activities of an Australian organisation called Getup Footnote 1! -they were particularly active during recent federal and state elections. Obviously there are supporters and detractors of this organisation, but they do seem to have had some success in mobilising communities by questioning orthodoxy and putting forth alternative positions on issues of general social and political interest. They are very successful in using social media to build constituencies and coalitions. Organisationally GetUp! is an independent, grass-roots community advocacy organisation giving everyday Australians opportunities to get involved and hold politicians accountable on important issues. They use a variety of media to engage with political and social issues. Whether it is sending an email to a member of parliament, engaging with the media, attending an event or helping to get a television ad on the air, GetUp! members take targeted, coordinated and strategic action. Getup! aims to build an accountable and progressive Parliament – a Parliament with economic fairness, social justice and environment at its core.Footnote 2 An activist approach by teachers would have equity and inclusion at its core and be responsive to the needs of individuals and communities. They would also use social media to communicate and connect with communities.

A social movement or organisation that represents teachers and the teaching profession can learn much from the strategies for mobilisation of community action groups such as Getup!. Being non-aligned to any political party will ensure wider membership, the focus will be on improving education rather than being diverted by an agenda of a specific political party. Democratic principles provide the philosophical foundation for action, facilitating social transformation. Local issues are often at the forefront but these collectively can contribute to a broader agenda, not quite a revolution but at least social change. Importantly, an activist teaching profession would seek to have some influence in policy formulation and implementation. Perhaps in an advisory role at first but later being at the table to ensure that the interests of teachers are represented and heard. Teachers need to take targeted, coordinated and strategic action on matters of educational importance either at the local, state or national level. This also requires commitment and courage and strong engagement from teacher educators working inside universities.

In the current climate, where teacher compliance and bureaucratic control is becoming the norm, a major shift in focus is required for teachers and teacher educators to become activist agents for the development and renewal of their profession. This in turn would mean reshaping the public’s perception of teachers’ work and their expertise. In short, it means accepting the importance of the teaching professional to broader community and to society. To achieve this end requires a major change, some would call it a seismic shift others would see it as a logical extension of the professionalization of the teaching profession. Moreover, it would require significant changes in teacher education and professional development.

In order then for there to be an alignment between accountability, standards and activism the shift will require the following,

Moving from

Moving to

Contractual accountability

Responsive accountability

Imposed by government

Developed by teachers

Regulation

Development

Imposed accountability

Individual and collective responsibility

Government directed and controlled

Profession developed and managed

Mistrust

Trust

External-regulation

Self-regulation

Compliance

Activism

Clearly the status quo is no longer tenable, a shift needs to occur. The question is how do we do this? Below I identify a number of areas where action can be taken to facilitate a more transformative outcome where accountability and activism are complementary.

  1. 1.

    Having a desire for and commitment to change

    Change readiness is important. In this regard sometimes an idea emerges that is right for the times and is embraced quickly and gains immediate acceptance. Nevertheless, the change must be seen to have some value for people to take it up. To achieve the desired outcomes for educational improvement requires that issues and interventions are prioritised. Some early quick wins provides direction and energy for future actions.

  2. 2.

    Collective and connected action

    Activism is premised on collective action and collective responsibility. It involves mobilising teachers and members of the community around issues of mutual interest and importance. To be effective it requires that a small number of issues are identified- these may be of local school based interest, regional or even national interest or importance. Social networking technologies facilitate connecting with various constituencies to get the message across. It also involves a sense of immediacy and community building.

  3. 3.

    Commitment to on-going professional learning

    We need to learn from our experiences- this can be in either a formal or informal sense. Teachers, like all professionals, need to keep up to date in their professional knowledge. This is not just content knowledge of their discipline but also knowledge about trends in assessment and technology among other areas. Learning should be at the core of our practice; it should be active and replenishing at the individual level and focused on improvement at the profession level.

  4. 4.

    Having confidence in our practice

    The wisdom of practice is that teaching is a private activity. As long teaching is seen to be a private act opportunities to improve practice through peer observation, reflection and practitioner research will be dismissed. For Ravitch (2010, p. 229)

    Schools cannot be improved if we use them for society’s all purpose punching bag, blaming them for the ills of the economy, the burdens imposed on children by poverty, the dysfunction of families and the erosion of civility. Schools must work with other institutions and cannot replace them.

    When we are confident in our practice we can defend schools and teachers. We can act as advocates for quality teaching and improved learning outcomes.

  5. 5.

    Developing a scholarship of practice

    The scholarship of practice ensures that there is a shared language and methodology to investigate activities in schools and classrooms. It makes some of the taken-for-granted assumptions about practice transparent, and accessible to those outside of schools and classrooms. Importantly it helps to make us more accountable as teachers in as much as we are communicating in an understandable way to a variety of stakeholders. The scholarship of practice also helps to reinforce teacher learning and acts as a repository for good practices for from which others can learn.

6 Conclusion

In this chapter I have brought together what seem to be three competing concepts currently shaping debate and practice in the arena of teacher education. Accountability, standards and activism do not need to be oppositional. Rather by pursuing an organic, profession developed approach to standards, the external demands for accountability of government can meet the internally driven needs of teachers and their students and the communities which they serve. Activism is not a strategy of defiance but rather a way to contribute to informed debate, influence and policy response. It is not only teachers that need to be accountable; it is politicians and bureaucrats as well. At the centre of accountability and activism is the commitment to making practice transparent, developing confidence in the teaching profession and improving student learning outcomes. This is the way for the teaching profession to shape the future agenda for education and schooling.