Modernizing schooling through performance management: a critical appraisal

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which a culture of performance has impacted on schooling in the English setting and draws parallels with other post‐industrializing nations. There is a growing awareness amongst researchers and practitioners that improving the quality of teaching and learning through performance management is not working. In education policy terms the UK Government has made much of the importance of modernizing the teaching profession in raising levels of achievement, attainment, and success in schools and colleges. The proposed trade‐off for teachers is improved pay for improved standards. Advocates of such reform point to the benefits derived from greater devolution of market principles to frontline professionals which, it is argued, enhance performance, remuneration, and motivation (Barber 2001). Critics, on the other hand, have criticized the deprofessionalizing tendency of tying performance management to government targets, which fail to connect with the contextual realities of teaching and learning in the classroom or education workplace (Elliott 2001, Merson 2001). Recently such criticism was rejected by the (then) Secretary of State for Education as cynicism. ‘In education it is those who offer cynicism in the guise of experience who can drive young teachers to look for other careers. We shall always try to combat cynicism wherever it threatens progress on standards’ (Morris 2001: 9). This paper seeks to avoid such inference by arguing for greater authenticity in the way education practice might drive, rather than being driven by, the policy and performance agenda.