The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Spiders or Starfish: Two Futures for Public Assurance

Whenever a tire is flat, the flatness is manifested at the bottom of the tire. But the hole isn’t always at the bottom. In education, the evidence about teacher and student performance is generated at the school level. The temptation is to blame the teachers or school-level factors for inefficiencies or poor performance.”
—Lant Pritchett, The Rebirth of Education

In his recent global review of efforts to shift education systems away from centralized bureaucratic data-gathering regimes of accountability, Lant Pritchett, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Governance, predicts that the development of appropriate school performance reporting will remain as one of the key predictors of the success of school reform efforts globally. Without courageous political leadership, governments will espouse a desire to transform the nature of schooling but will be blocked by the inertia fuelled by a number of forces including PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment) and other variations of the market-driven data analytics movement that sees ranking and competition as drivers of reform.

The flat-tire image is especially instructive here in Alberta as we attempt to move from an accountability model (i.e., the Accountability Pillar) to one focused on public assurance and professional responsibility. What will this shift look like after two decades of one of the most elaborate bureaucratic testing regimes in North America?

The Alberta government must address the need to take what Pritchett calls “the long route”—one that embraces accountability as a “system property” that considers the broader societal circumstances that influence school success. This point was reinforced recently by the preeminent scholar David Berliner in a series of international conferences. Berliner pointed to research indicating that the impact of the quality of teaching on student learning outcomes is only 10 per cent, with student background, community circumstances and other variables shaping 90 per cent.¹

Directly challenging the growing focus on “teacher quality” trotted out by the OECD/PISA and other like-minded data-gathering cottage industries, Berliner reminds us that “the rush to improve student achievement through accountability systems relying on high-stakes tests, our policy makers and citizens forgot, or cannot understand, or deliberately avoid the fact that our children live nested lives.”

Inspiring Action Deflated?

While there is a growing research consensus that the challenges visible at the school level may have causes that are far removed from schools, the complexity of the challenges we will face here in Alberta in bringing education partners together to develop new ways of meaningfully assessing and reporting student and school success will determine whether Inspiring Action becomes yet another forgotten chapter in Alberta’s education reform history.

There are certainly some hopeful signs of positive change, such as the recent decision to eliminate the provincial achievement testing program. In its place is a promise to create beginning-of-the-year assessments in Grades 3, 6 and 9 that will provide helpful information for teachers and support instruction. In contrast to these collaborative efforts involving government and the field, there are growing signals that the student engagement survey Tell Them From Me may become mandated as part of a new provincial accountability regime. With little formal consultation with provincial education partners, in November, 2013, Alberta Education signed a three-year contract with a private vendor, The Learning Bar, for the Tell Them From Me (TTFM) survey. As a January 23, 2014 notice to school authorities outlined, “The contract supports a cost sharing model between the Ministry and school authorities choosing to use the TTFM survey. Included in the contract is the embedding of the Accountability Pillar survey questions for students within the TTFM Survey, thus streamlining survey administration and reducing survey fatigue.” The message here is not unambiguous: as schools attempt to work through the implementation of Inspiring Action, the government, in partnership with private contractors, will determine the indicators and measures that define school success.

Alberta’s Choice: Spiders or Starfish

The choice ahead for public assurance is between spiders and starfish. Pritchett (2013) characterizes most educational jurisdictions today as “spider organizations” (p 5) where schools inhabit a web of connections meant to monitor and support. Information flows in spider organizations to a central hub that triggers responses to a central bureaucracy that determines appropriate policies and measures. While spider organizations are terrific at organizing and delivering standardized solutions to large scale (think the growth of suburbs in urban planning), as systems mature and the complexity of their individual environmental contexts grows in complexity, spider strategies prove inadequate.

An alternative path can be found in that of the starfish. Starfish, many of which have no brain, exist as highly decentralized nervous systems because they do not rely on a centralized hub to sustain and thrive. A well-established body of research provides powerful insights into the power of “starfish” strategies: social network theory, deep ecology and self-organizing systems.

Research focused on reconceptualizing school performance reporting in Alberta using the starfish approach has been a priority of the Association for a number of years. In conjunction with a graduate course offered with the University of Alberta, a series of case studies that focused on redesigning various aspects of Alberta’s two-decades-old Accountability Pillar led to publication of a book (Gariepy, Spencer and Couture 2009) that focused on a distributed approach to school performance reporting. This approach featured networks of schools working together through peer review to establish public assurance. Follow-up research partnerships with two school jurisdictions resulted in alternative indicators of school success based on emerging research on emotional intelligence and community engagement. This work highlighted the need to provide alternatives to the global education reform movement that privileges standardization, technological quick fixes and other market-driven reforms (Murgatroyd and Sahlberg 2010).

As outlined in Rethinking School Leadership: Creating Great Schools for All Students (Couture and Murgatroyd 2012), it would be difficult to overstate the unintended consequences of two decades of spider approaches to accountability here in this province that have relied on elaborate data-management systems marketed by private sector companies and a small army of consultants. Hopefully, Inspiring Action will help the education sector move past the era of the government’s spider approaches—data warehouse; the Accountability Pillar, supported by its attending coterie of private consultants; and its own internal bureaucracy.

The Association continues to work with the international research community on “starfish” approaches that emphasize professional responsibility and community engagement anchored to the vision outlined in A Great School for All (Alberta Teachers’ Association 2011). The call for public assurance outlined in this publication raises important research questions that the government needs to explore with education partners in the important work ahead:

1. How do we ensure equity for all learners—no matter what their home conditions, physical or mental challenges, or levels of support in the community?
2. How do we provide learning pathways that meet the different needs of different learners while, at the same time, ensuring the quality of all learning taking place in the school?
3. How do we leverage the assets of a community to enable all to learn in a school?
4. How do we leverage technology to support engaged and inclusive learning for all?
5. How do we enable schools to design learning pathways for each student so that their ambitions, hopes and opportunities are realized?

“Starfish” approaches to school and system performance reporting should include four key elements:

1. consideration of school finance,
2. the delegation of authority and responsibility to appropriate players,
3. access to meaningful support and information, and
4. trust in those charged with achieving defined goals (Pritchett 2013, 138–39).

A sustained and collaborative research effort to achieve this form of public assurance is possible. The path chosen by government in the months and years ahead will largely determine the success or failure of Inspiring Action.

References

Alberta Teachers’ Association. 2011. A Great School for All—Transforming Education in Alberta. Edmonton, Alta: Alberta Teachers’ Association.

Couture, J-C, and S. Murgatroyd. 2012. Rethinking School Leadership—Creating Great Schools for All Students. Edmonton: Rethink.

Gariepy, K.D., B. L. Spencer and J-C Couture, eds. 2009. Educational Accountability—Educational Voices from the Field. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense.

Murgatroyd, S., and P. Sahlberg. 2010. Accountability, Learning and the Teacher—Looking at Real Learning First. Unpublished.

Pritchett, L. 2013. The Rebirth of Education. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development.

J-C Couture is the ATA’s associate coordinator, research.

1    For example, see Berliner’s presentation at Primary Education—Taking Stock, Moving Forward, a conference in Wellington, New Zealand, January 22–24, 2014. A video presentation is available at the conference website, www.education2014.org.nz.