1st Edition
Education, Professionalism, and the Quest for Accountability Hitting the Target but Missing the Point
This book focuses on education and its relation to professional accountability as viewed from two different, but not unrelated, perspectives. First, the book is about the work of professionals in schools and colleges (teachers, head teachers, leaders, principals, directors and educational managers, etc.) and the detrimental effects which our present system of accountability – and the managerialism which this system creates – have had on education, its practice, its organization, its conduct and its content. It is also about the professional education (the occupational/professional formation and development) of practitioners in communities other than educational ones and how they, too, contend with the effects of this system on their practices.
These different perspectives represent two sides of the same problem: that whatever one’s métier – whether a teacher, nurse, social worker, community officer, librarian, civil servant, etc – all who now work in institutions designed to serve the public are expected to reorganize their thoughts and practice in accordance with a "performance" management model of accountability which encourages a rigid bureaucracy, one which translates regulation and monitoring procedures, guidelines and advice into inflexible and obligatory compliance. A careful scrutiny of the underlying rationale of this "managerial" model shows how and why it may be expected, paradoxically, to make practices less accountable – and, in the case of education, less educative.
Introduction Part I: Starting-Points: Ideas, Ideals and Ideologies 1. From Concern to Doubt, From Doubt to Critique 2. Quest for Accountability: The Managerial Response 3. The Lure of the Explicit: Managerial Modes of Accountability and the Ideal of Transparency Part II: Practical Judgement 4. Responsibility and Accountability 5. Accountability, Answerability and the Virtue of Responsibleness: Sketch of a Neo-Aristotelian Model of Practical Rationality 6. Quest for Accountability: The Neo-Aristotelian Response Part III: End-Points: Ideas, Ideals and Ideologies 7. Return of the Lure of the Explicit: ‘Making the Implicit Explicit’ 8. ‘Knowing How To’: Further Attempts to Make Practical Knowledge Explicit 9. Public Trust and Accountability: What Public? Whose Trust? Which Accountability? Conclusion
Biography
Dr. Jane Green is a freelance consultant and tutor, designing and running ethics courses. Further information can be found at www.ethics-courses.com.
"...there is much to enjoy in this extended essay that is of relevance beyond the world of education. Defending the priority of seasoned judgement against a world of auditing and targets may also prove to be an argument whose time has come and may find surprisingly fertile ground in the new politics of austerity sweeping through Western Europe."- Michael Power, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol.33, No.4, July 2012
"Jane Green’s book is an important addition to the literature on professionalism. It aims and lands some well-directed (and much deserved) volleys on the target of the new public management. It is scrupulously written, attendant to the contemporary literature, and sustains a progressive narrative throughout." - Ron Barnett, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol.48, No.3, 2014
"There is much to recommend this book. Green has a firm grasp of the literature, and she is discerning in selecting the appropriate quotation. She is a fine and perceptive writer, whose lucid prose is inviting. And while this book is obviously aimed at an academic audience, the central themes Green addresses obviously touch the lives of all citizens." - Patrick Keeney, PROSPERO, Volume 17, number 3
