Performance and Performativity in Education

Abstract

The development of performance indicators for Australian schools and higher education is predicated on the false as sertion that policy makers have hitherto ignored education outcomes. Performance indicators for higher education orig inated in the government's 1985 Guidelines to the Tertiary Education Commission. The Australian experiences with per formance indicators in higher education has been similar to the British and European experience. Performance indicators for schools have their origins in the 1985 Quality of Education Review. National development of performance measures has been remarkably diffident about their prospects. This equivocation about performance measures has parallels with what some have seen as a deeper crisis in the human sciences. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard suggests that per vasive in modern society is 'performativity', which is the reduction of all judgement to the criterion of efficiency of in put-output relations. 'Performativity' is elevated to a general principle when other grand narratives of social coherence lose their force, but 'performativity' itself becomes unstable under post-modern conditions. An approach to meaning which relies less on speech-act theory and more on meaning deriving from different forms-of-life avoids condemning performance indicators to measure the in commensurable. This would better accord with the reality of education systems and other bureaucracies which do not oper ate as totalising systems. In this light, policy makers could be more sanguine about prospects for performance indicators.