Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biography
- one Thinking politically: challenging public education
- two Action: professionals learning to labour
- three Plurality: the idea and reality of choice
- four Natality: the opportunity to do new things
- five Promising: school diversity and competition
- six Responsibility and judging: producing and using numbers
- seven Forgiving: the end of public education
- eight Thinking politically again: the conditions for public education
- References
- Index
six - Responsibility and judging: producing and using numbers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biography
- one Thinking politically: challenging public education
- two Action: professionals learning to labour
- three Plurality: the idea and reality of choice
- four Natality: the opportunity to do new things
- five Promising: school diversity and competition
- six Responsibility and judging: producing and using numbers
- seven Forgiving: the end of public education
- eight Thinking politically again: the conditions for public education
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The following quotation is from an academy principal:
‘This is how it's gonna be. You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus. And if you’re on the bus, then we’ll do everything we can to help and support you. But if you’re not, then you’re off the bus. And that's either through redundancy, through a restructure, through a change in roles, through a capability, through, “do you know, what? This isn't the job for me, I’m applying elsewhere.”’ (Courtney and Gunter 2015, p17)
What is being said is how surveillance works to control staff performance through number production and evaluation, where data dominates what matters in regard to educational purposes. The professional can only know about the ‘business’ of that school if the numbers ‘add up’ in order to determine which activity is worthwhile, and this can only be through self-regarding forms of leaders, leading and leadership. And so: ‘I suppose being a head means to me, right now, is about having that leadership and having that … vision and having that drive’ (Courtney and Gunter 2015, p12). This professional is ventriloquising the orthodoxy of transformational leadership, where the use of visioning and missioning enables the elite leader to narrate the meaning of data and so determine what this means for practice. It seems that selecting data and using it to make performance claims by smoothing a narrative is what matters in a high stakes context of biopolitical distinctiveness. I intend examining how this is integral to segregating the system by using Arendt's (2003) thinking about responsibility and judgement where she identifies what happens when people are rendered thoughtless, particularly in how a situation is framed and understood through fabricated myth-making. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity (EPKP) to the creation of ‘data-rich’ schools in England enables an examination of a form of depoliticisation by calculation where the interplay between standards, numbers and school leadership is being deployed to change identities and practices. The state has been able to make contractual alliances with elite individuals, companies and networked knowledge producers who have used particular ideologies in order to present a seductive, trainable and measurable model for the modern professional.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Public EducationReform Ideas and Issues, pp. 113 - 134Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018