Making Sense of Performance Management: official rhetoric and teachers’ reality

Abstract

Performance management is one aspect of major reforms which have transformed the public sector workforce in Australia and other Western countries since the 1980s. Embedded in the discourse of managerialism, performance management represents an attempt by the state to make workers—in this case teachers—more efficient, more effective and more accountable. In this paper we want to explore and compare a number of perspectives on performance management. Firstly, we consider several evaluation studies which have been undertaken in various contexts over recent years. These studies tend to take for granted the assumptions behind performance management and to judge its effectiveness within the framework of managerial thinking itself. Secondly, we review the critical literature which locates performance management in a broader social and political context and considers the interests it might serve. Finally, we present the perspectives of a focus group of teachers who are currently ‘being performance managed’ and reflect on the relationship between their stories, the official rhetoric of their education system and the views expressed in the literature.