The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Over the past fifty years, theorists of language, such as Foucault (1977, 1991) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980), have helped us to understand how prevailing discourses have significant power to shape our social realities, our conceptions of what constitutes good and proper action, and our understandings of ourselves and others. In my own policy research over the past 15 years,¹ I have focused on the discourses, practices, and effects of accountability that have constituted the educational reform landscapes of Ontario and Alberta. Specific to Alberta, my findings show that by shifting the focus from one of accountability to one of public assurance, we are opening up immense possibilities for thinking about and doing education differently.

Accountability: Rationality and Technologies

For almost 25 years now, education in Alberta has been shaped by two prevailing discourses—competing in a global economy and restoring public trust. These discourses assume certain problems—for example, inconsistent educational achievement, employability and lack of public sector transparency. They also offer solutions—for example, “continuous educational improvement” results, and “success” (Alberta Education 2008, 2), the production of a workforce for meeting demands of today’s global economy, and the assertion that public tax dollars are appropriately spent and accounted for. This problem/solution articulation has established a certain accountability rationality that operates as a system of logic by which ways of thinking about and going about education have emerged and are justified (Spencer 2009, 2012). This accountability rationality is manifest in various concrete technologies of standardization (performance-based assessment and evaluation that includes large-scale provincial testing and surveying of teachers, students, and parents) and, most recently, standardized Accountability Pillar reporting of measurable and easily comparable results (Spencer 2012).

Accountability Effects: Subjectivities and Conduct

The technologies of the Accountability Pillar, which originate with Alberta’s Ministry of Education, are mobilized and reproduced through processes of translation at the local site. In this sense, at the school, accountability is achieved at a distance. And, in many regards, the mechanisms of the Pillar function, from afar, as modes of subjectification. Teachers and administrators, albeit often with discomfort, take up and enact the practices of being accountable and, moreover, engage in a range of initiatives meant to remediate teachers and students so as to ensure that Pillar reports will improve consistently (Spencer 2009).²

Numerous findings of my studies cited above concur with other research on the effects of accountability reforms, especially those specific to standardization.³ Results reveal the unintended and negative effects of standards-based conceptions of student achievement and educational improvement, particularly in schools that serve minority and economically disadvantaged students. My studies also reflect findings of research on school leadership⁴ that reveal how, in response to what are often referred to as top-down accountability policies, administrators have moved into management roles as, increasingly, their time has become devoted to monitoring, accounting for and administering policies concerned with performance and outcomes. Educators talked about their experiences of accountability in performative terms (Ranson 2003). Conceptions of public or of ethical-professional accountability, where members of a community share responsibility for education through participation for democratic purposes,⁵ were mentioned only to point to their absence.

Public Assurance: New Discourse For New Conditions and Possibilities

The work of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (2012), with its focus on public assurance, presents a challenge to Alberta’s current accountability regime. It has prompted a shift in discourse that opens up possibilities for thinking about and doing education differently.

If we were to analyze the concept of public assurance in a way similar to how I have examined polices for accountability, we could ask: What broader discourses and assumptions underpin this new conceptualization for education? How might we think about public assurance as a rationality with a corollary set of technologies and, then, how might we identify and analyze its effects? Answering these questions would require a close examination of how, specifically, public assurance is operationalized—how it is produced and reproduced (or not) in the texts and talk about transforming education and in the specificity of local social relations and actions, and how it is productive in introducing what is possible (or not) to know and to do. Indeed, these will be important considerations for analyses if the discourse of public assurance actually takes hold.

However, I argue that, at this point, even in its mere introduction into our discussions about education, public assurance offers an opportunity to interrupt and alter the rationality of accountability. Now is the time to not only think about but, more importantly, to talk about public assurance and, through language, set the stage for change. For example, we could start by identifying prevailing discourses: We could see that, of late, a new “problem” is evident in the summary of Alberta Education’s (2010a) Inspiring Education - Alberta’s Vision for Education: “Our education system must grow and adapt in order to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities of a constantly evolving world” (para. 1). The proposed “solution” involves developing “competencies and attributes [that] will be particularly important to the success of our students” (para. 1). These include certain subjectivities: the engaged thinker who critically questions, the ethical citizen who is compassionate and respectful, and the entrepreneurial learner who is motivated, resourceful and a bold leader (para. 2–4).

We could then ask: What specific, concrete technologies will be shaped by the rationality of rapid change in the 21st century? Some are cited in the text: a “broad policy framework document” (para. 6) and, more specifically, a new provincial dual credit strategy, improvements to the provincial diploma exam, a high school flexibility program, and a review and replacement of the old provincial achievement tests (para. 9). The language of these examples includes references to flexibility, learning through mastery, and student-friendly assessment of “competencies such as creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving” that are understandable to teachers and parents (para. 9). Such objectives signal a significant departure from the way education is currently defined in terms of accountability.

If we accept that our realities are shaped by language, and that the discourses that define our experiences and our understandings of ourselves and others are socially and historically constructed, and therefore contingent, we can see that we are now at an important juncture. If we think about the discourses and practices promoted in the Inspiring Education texts, not in terms of accountability, but in terms of public assurance, the possibilities are numerous and compelling. For example, we might start by promoting a conception of public that has been missing in the accountability policies of earlier reforms. Hauser (1999), for example, suggests that, rather than a predetermined space or site, or an identified body of individuals, the public sphere is a rhetorical sphere, constituted by the discourse and activity of members of society who come together around shared interests, problems or concerns.

An alternative to the top-down operation of accountability policies, where education is governed at a distance through the translation of a rationality into technologies of, for example, standardization, Hauser’s conception of the public sphere helps us to imagine conditions that are an authentic reflection of problems identified in situ and solutions articulated at the local level, by a collective of affected, invested and informed individuals who are moved to action by proximity. For example, serving the unique needs of students of a particular community requires attention to the immediate and the relevant—contingencies that cannot be anticipated by the standardized, remotely coordinated and limiting approaches of accountability.

Such conditions also allow for relational proximity, where participants work closely and responsibility is shared in a spirit of reciprocity and respect. For example, working within a “broad policy framework” (Alberta Education 2010a, para. 6) could mean that educators, parents and community members are guided, but not bound, by conceptions of achievement and improvement that are defined outside of the sphere, as they have been by Accountability Pillar reports. Discourses of success could be deliberated and negotiated, on an ongoing basis, in accordance with particular local concerns, and they would accommodate difference and diversity and the socioeconomic circumstances of unique school communities. In this way, accountability, and its deliberately neutralized and normalizing technologies and effects, would be replaced by assurance, a concept that denotes relational trust and a mutual pledge, a commitment to the promise of public education. Unlike accountability, which is predicated on the discourse of a lack of public trust, assurance assumes a positive stance and asserts a tone of good will. In this sense, public assurance is a discourse of fidelity, confidence and shared ownership (Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 2001). It has the potential to instill a sense of pride in the work we do together to ensure that students are able “to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities of a constantly evolving world” (Alberta Education 2010a, para. 1).

The above examples provide only a cursory exploration of how public assurance offers possibilities for conceptualizing Alberta’s Inspiring Education vision in ways that encourage a fundamental shift in our understandings, arrangements, and practices of education. The full text of Inspiring Education (Alberta Education, 2010b) is filled with the language of possibility and education renewal. In some important ways it is similar to the ATA’s (2012) A Great School for All. It calls for a more thorough analysis for identifying the multiple spaces and opportunities for introducing and establishing a discourse of public assurance.

References

Alberta Education. 2008. Accountability Pillar handout material. Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/admin/funding/accountability/about.aspx.

———. 2010a. Inspiring Education: Alberta’s Vision for Education. Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/media/7145083/inspiring%20education%20steering%20committee%20report.pdf.

———. 2010b. Inspiring Education: A Dialogue with Albertans. Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/media/7145083/inspiring%20education%20steering%20committee%20report.pdf.

Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA). 2012. A Great School for All: Transforming Education in Alberta. Edmonton, Alta: ATA.

Blackmore, J. 1988. Assessment and Accountability. Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press.

Dean, M. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage.

Foucault, M. 1977. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Trans C. Gordon. Brighton, England: Harvester.

———. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed G. Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller, 87–104. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Harris, A. 2002. “Effective Leadership in Schools Facing Challenging Contexts.” School Leadership and Management 22, no 1: 15–26.

Hauser, G. 1999. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press.

Johnson, D. D., and B Johnson. 2002. High Stakes: Children, Testing, and Failure in American Schools. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield.

Kogan, M. 1988. Education Accountability: An Analytic Overview. 2nd ed. London, UK: Hutchinson.

Lacelle-Peterson, M. 2000. “Choosing Not to Know: How Assessment Policies and Practices Obscure the Education of Language Minority Students.” In Assessment: Social Practice and Social Product, ed A. Filer, 27–42. London, UK: RoutledgeFalmer.

Lakoff, G., and M Johnson. 1980. “Concepts We Live By.” In Metaphors We Live By, 3–6. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

McNeil, L. 2000. Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing. New York: Routledge.

Ranson, S. 2003. “Public Accountability in the Age of Neo-Liberal Governance.” Journal of Education Policy 18, no 5: 459–80. doi: 10.1080/0268093032000124848

Ravitch, D. 2010. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.

Rose, N. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Simkins, T. 2000. “Education Reform and Managerialism: Comparing the Experience of Schools and Colleges.” Journal of Education Policy 15, no 3: 317–32.

Spencer, B. L. 2009. “Governmentality and Urban Schooling: The Effects of Policies for Accountability and Standardized Literacy Testing.” Discourse of Sociological Practice8, no 2: 75–87.

———. 2012. “Representing Alberta’s North: The Effects of Standardized Reporting for Educational Accountability—Part II. Paper presented at the Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Stein, J. Gross. 2001. The Cult of Efficiency. Toronto, Ont.: Anansi.

Wagner, R. 1989. Accountability in Education: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York: Routledge.

Wallace, J. 2000. Tales from the Trenches: School Administrators and Educational Restructuring in Ontario and British Columbia. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities, Edmonton, Alberta.

Brenda Spencer is an associate professor of education at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary.

1    Specifically, with an interest in power and the contemporary state, following scholars such as Rose (1999) and Dean (1999), I utilize Foucault’s (1991) concept of governmentality as an orientation to empirical data.

2    For example, in the interviews of the studies, educators talked about the ways in which they have started to work together, through local and district professional development initiatives, to develop strategies for improving Provincial Achievement Test (PAT) and Diploma Exam scores, to try to ensure that students are actively engaged in their learning, and that parents are involved in the schools.  Curriculum specific to exam writing strategies was produced, tutoring sessions for students were held for test preparation, noon-hour clubs were formed to get teenagers involved in personal development and career planning, and campaigns were launched to educate parents about the importance of PATS and Diploma Exams and to encourage them to actually complete and return the Parent Questionnaire/Survey of the Accountability Pillar.

3    See, for example, LaCelle-Peterson (2000), Johnson and Johnson (2002), McNeil (2000), and Ravitch (2010).

4    See, for example, Harris (2002), Simkins (2000), and Wallace (2000)

5    For explanation of various conceptions of accountability, see Blackmore (1988), Kogan (1988), Ranson (2003), Stein (2001), and Wagner (1989).