In this section it is argued that at the
same time as the federal and state governments have placed economic concerns
at the centre of decision making in response to globalisation, the reform
of school education, best understood as a process of institutional re-regulation,
has changed the work of teachers, parents and students. In addition, changes
in the management of the public sector impact particularly on the work
of Principals as they become subject to a common framework of corporate
performativity and accounting.
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1. Reform and re- regulation.
The view held by both the recent Labour and
current Liberal Commonwealth governments is that education is a matter
of national interest. The provision of a skilled labour force is seen as
central to continued economic development: investors are both attracted
to and retain a presence in Australia and local companies are more productive
if there is a good educational and training infrastructure. Educational
policy is therefore subject to increased attention: there is now careful
policy prescription of the nature of the required changes.
(a) The 1970s - a period of some deregulation.
The seventies and early eighties were a time when regulatory controls on
schools were loosened. Commonwealth involvement in schooling began in earnest
in the Whitlam period. The conception of school reform that prevailed was
one where innovation and change were relatively open ended. School based
decisions by teachers and parents determined the directions and details
of changes that would meet broad national social policy goals of increased
retention, participation and equity. Commonwealth funding was used as an
incentive, and it was state administrations which placed restrictions on
schools through submission and evaluation processes.
South Australia moved away from inspectorial
supervision of staff, from central budgeting and supply, and placed the
locus of many decisions at the school level through the introduction of
School Councils and changed Principal roles. The previous tightly regimented,
text book driven approach to curriculum was substantially shaken, the technical
- high school divide was tackled in the move to comprehensive high schools
and the abolition of the more extreme forms of tracking and setting, and
there were experiments with school organisation and structures (sub-schools,
open space, alternative schools, annexes). There was still tight control
over student enrolments through zoning mechanisms; these also exercised
some restraint on demands for buildings and equipment and supported the
emphasis on the neighbourhood nature of the school. There was also tight
central control over teacher and Principal appointment, transfer and promotion.
A bevy of advisers and an energetic young teaching force moved to take
up the new curriculum and decision making spaces that were available.
In the long vision of history, this period of relative deregulation is
more clearly seen as somewhat of an aberration, although it was the formative
experience for many current teachers and administrators who have not generally
enthusiastically embraced the transition to a more tightly and differently
regulated system.
There has been a gradual, not seismic, change
over the last fifteen years. The seventies model was expensive and South
Australia has been both in demographic and economic decline for perhaps
longer than most other states. There were pressures at state and national
level for further reforms - for example:
The period of de regulation did support increased student retention, although
the degree of difference in performance of social categories of students
(eg SES, Aboriginality) was unacceptable to many, including the organisations
representing those sections of the public School based curriculum development
and change was patchy and had to contend with the continued tight control
of the post compulsory curriculum exercised through the public examinations
system. There was pressure to place a floor, a minimum (basic) learning
standard to guarantee that the overall failure levels produced by the system
would decrease
There was some consensus that a national common curriculum framework was
necessary for citizens in a democratic country
School staffs and Principals argued that in order to reform they needed
to select staff School Councils wanted Principals selected to match the
needs of the schools, equity groups argued that merit must replace seniority
and procedural rules were required to manage school based selection, and
parents argued they wanted to enrol their children in schools of their
choice.
(b) The 80s and 90s - a period of re-
regulation.
The response to these pressures has been enacted differently in different
states. However, what is common is the trend to reverse the previous reforms
- to tighten up curriculum provision through the development of national
frameworks and in some cases (eg New South Wales) state syllabus requirements,
and to loosen up institutional infrastructures such as staffing, budgets
and buildings and to reduce restrictions on student enrolment. More responsibility
at the school level is dependent on increased accountability measures,
geared to describing results. The role of central office changes to one
of policy development, monitoring and accountability. This package of measures
is usually referred to as devolution, or school based management.
The theory supporting devolution is drawn
from one strand of the post industrial management literature, in particular
that sketched out by Osborne and Gaebler (18). It has been fleshed out further by Caldwell, Spinks, and Beare(28),
and put into full effect in Victoria as the Schools of the Future program.
In America, charter schools legislation (29) as popularised by Chester
Finn (30) has been seen as a means of introducing
innovation into a stagnant system of public education, and most recently
Hill, Lawrence and Guthrie(31)
have suggested that all public school systems should be contractually organised.
Opting out (32) and
devolution have operated in England for some time and New
Zealand (33)was one of the early adopters
of this style of institutional reform. The practice is one that which places
fewer central restrictions around institutional infrastructure - staff,
budgets, buildings, and student enrolments ( the very things that were
previously controlled), and more central control over curriculum (previously
much more at the discretion of the teacher and school).
Although South Australia is now at the national
tail end of institutional reform via school based budgeting, it is arguably
in the best place to learn from substantive experience
here and overseas(34). Institutional reform
using the policy levers of human and financial resources, does have significant
effects on both the nature and amount of work done by teachers and Principals,
can alter entrenched patterns of allocation, can be used as a cost cutting
measure but does not automatically and by itself improve student learning.
It is largely an efficiency measure, rather than dealing with quality and
effectiveness. There is now considerable evidence that the schools that
deal best with devolved responsibilities are those that also have a strong
educational (curriculum) reform agenda and that, without strong central
intervention in the form of differential funding, disparities between devolved
rich and poor schools dramatically increase. In a marketised and cost cutting
environment, devolution is a risky venture. A policy framework that supported
both autonomy and mutuality (35)
would only be a first step towards managing potential dangers.
(c) The Howard reforms - competition policy.
In recent times the federal Liberal government has moved to use funding
to promote competition and to enforce policy in a more coercive way. It
has simplified the agenda to one of literacy, numeracy, citizenship and
work training, forced the development of national benchmarks and comparative
performance tables and threatens the withdrawal of funding for noncompliance
and poor performance. Through supporting the development of new private
schools, and the rhetoric of a wider choice for parents the expectation
is that more competition will improve the performance of existing providers
as they work to maintain their enrolments. The emphasis is not on innovation
or providing new curriculum arrangements and options for students. Individual
schools or systems may decide that innovation is what the market wants
and is viable, affordable and still produces the accountability requirements.
Public revelation of performance works to further the pressure to perform.
The policy levers of outcomes, accountability, competition, and selective
public information are now the stuff of Commonwealth - state relations
all states and the orthodox interpretation of the ideology and strategy
that supports the national economic goals.
Policy reform is decided away from schools.
Federal decision making is at the Ministerial level with working groups
of officials largely bound to confidentiality. The former Labour party
privileged particular peak bodies - unions, business and government through
the Accord - with consultation with representative groups, and advice from
a plethora of national bodies such as the National Board for Education,
Employment and Training. The current government has a different set of
groups, eliminating unions and some special interest groups, and privileging
others, including Principals Associations. (Arguably this is part of a
strategy to separate teachers and Principals as part of a more general
move against unions). Many of the consultative mechanisms have been abolished
and not replaced. This is not precisely the situation in South Australia
where both individuals and Principal Associations do have some access to
decision makers although many of the processes for making decisions are
unclear and consultation opportunities limited. The highly political and
'closed shop' nature of decision making and the increased use of the media
to make policy announcements in order to get political advantage, means
that many teachers and school Principals now feel removed from positions
where they can understand and influence both national and state education
policy.
(d) The likely result of reforms.
The combination of state based devolution policy, and increased federal
support for private schools and choice policy, work together to create
stand alone schools, both public and private, that compete with each other
for funds, image, students and sponsors. In the first instance this has
further encouraged and increased the movement of students from public schools
to the government subsidised private sector (36).
But there are three further significant effects:
(1) There is a fragmentation of the population who comprise the public
The development of small, private special interest schools removes those
children from contact with the broader community, and the community from
them.
(2) The curriculum shifts to what sells in the marketplace
Parental choice policy leads to schools competing to offer the course that
are perceived to offer individual students the best advantage - this is
most often either narrowly university oriented or heavily vocational. The
reduction of curriculum to a narrow skills base with an economic purpose
reinforces tendencies to recreate the technical/high school, mental/manual
divides. The creation of such a binary knowledge base and divided student
population is precisely what the public system has, less successfully that
hoped for, been working against for the last three decades
(3) There is a marginalisation of schools that serve the poor and those
of modest means
Funding policies that rely on parent contribution to school resources accentuate
the growing divisions between rich and poor. These may well be exacerbated
by trends to vocational versus academic curricula. Choice is a policy that
works for those who can afford, or who are located so that they have, a
choice - many in our communities cannot, and may well have a poorly resourced
state school struggling to offer a viable and varied curriculum as their
only option.
This very significantly undermines some of
the greatest strengths of the public system. Not only is the public education
system inclusive in enrolment, catering for all of the diverse groups that
make up the Australian public, it is also the institution that has the
capacity to shape a tolerant and inclusive Australian public. The public
values - equity and inclusivity- that underpin the public system are undermined
by the current policy directions as is the capacity of the public system
to provide a quality education for all.
Current policy reforms define choice as meaning
a choice between schools. Yet it could also mean mix and match, individual
student learning pathways that combine specialist and common learnings,
that draw from the full range of options in the public system. Collectively
the public education system can offer a huge range of curriculum options
because it has enormous intellectual capital and physical resources on
which to draw. It is only because this is fragmented, and each school isolated,
that non public schools are able to compete. Current reform then is a particular
version of competition -it is one which works better for some than others.
It advantages those who have the individual school resources to afford
a broad range of curriculum, and those who market themselves as meeting
particular social or religious needs. The considerable disincentives and
barriers to a systemic approach to choice and diversity are built on top
of the residues of the 1950s regulatory hierarchy and threaten the emerging
democratic and collaborative work that has slowly grown from the seeds
planted during the period of deregulation.
Paradoxically, the current educational reforms,
which are said to encourage competition, work against the public education
system competing as a system. The rhetoric of equity and excellence in
all schools and increased variety for students and parents, is highly likely
to lead to excellence for those that can afford it and diversified provision
of a more standardised curriculum. The reforms will not raise the standards
of the public education system - rather they will significantly damage
the capacity of public schools to educate all young people and will skew
further the already uneven social playing field.
2. Changes in public sector management.
Educational policies are put into operation
through the organisation of the public sector which carries with it its
own set of pressures, histories, and practices. The public sector which
supported the Welfare State of the post war period in Australia was characterised
by the separation of bureaucracy from the sphere of politics and the commitment
to impartiality guaranteed by standardised processes. The public sector
offered:
Its professional basis was the personal disinterest
of public servants and their commitment to the long term interests of the
public. The public sector was often criticised for its frustrating administrivia,
imperviousness to criticism and intervention, unresponsiveness to the public
it was meant to serve, and territorial behaviour.
Corporatisation.
The basis of contemporary public sector reform lies in reversing two previous
cardinal doctrines of impartiality and due process, viz. - lessening or
removing differences between the public and private sector and shifting
the emphasis from process accountability towards a greater element of accountability
in terms of results. The first steps towards reform were through 'corporatisation'
- the adoption of business practices such as strategic planning with its
requirements for common mission, performance indicators and annual reporting
through aggregated data collection; divisional structures that broke up
the large public sector structures into smaller units able to be individually
managed and monitored; emphasis on hands-on top management by newly named
Chief Executives; merit-based selection procedures that broke the old chain
of discriminatory seniority- based promotion and enabled organisational
culture and human resource management to come into focus; and the introduction
of evaluation, quality assurance and review processes that enabled a focus
on results not diminishing or additional financial resources. The corporatisation
of South Australian public education bureaucracy coincided with the appointment
of Dr Ken Boston and the state bureaucracy moved to three year plans, engaged
in major organisational restructurings, and accelerated the introduction
of merit based contractual appointments. Principals were more formally
charged with responsibility for their schools and with adopting the norms
and behaviours of the corporate culture.
Corporatisation should not be seen as being
all bad. It did enable a broader range of people to participate in decision
making processes, more people were involved in staff training, women entered
management positions in larger numbers, some procedures were streamlined
and the quality of public information about public services and the population
improved. Managerialism however had its negative aspects - the creation
of low trust working environments, increased documentation of plans and
performance, intensification of work, and the intrusion of generically
skilled managers into previously autonomous professional arenas. In Central
Offices, corporatised divisions became bunkers leaving officers in the
field to deal with competing agendas and intra- Departmental inefficiencies.
Marketisation.
The second overlapping phase of public sector reform is sometimes described
as 'market bureaucratisation' because of the emphasis on competition and
privatisation, 'contractualisation' because of the reliance on specified
individual, unit and institutional performance and sometimes as 'accountingisation
because of the introduction of new tools of accrual accounting and audit.
Introduction of the processes of audit and
management have enabled government to get 'inside' the public services
previously dominated by professionals, regarded as prime exemplars of 'provider
capture'. Doctor - patient relations and hospital provision have become
primarily questions of accounting and actuary open to management scrutiny
rather than firstly professional medical judgements. Likewise, schooling
is dominated by the average cost of school for its size and location, per
capita student cost with allowances for individual needs distributed to
schools in global budgets, and student, school and system results measured
as comparable test scores. It is on these 'objective measures' that judgements
about efficiency and effectiveness can be made and on which managers must
focus.
Organisational structures are realigned to
designate some 'core' units, those necessary for policy, regulation and
audit (the 'core business' of small government), separate from those that
deliver actual services. The separation of decision making from provision
attempts to reduce the role of service managers to implementers of policy.
When providers are given some autonomy and resources then conditions that
simulate a market enable efficiency and effectiveness to be achieved through
internal competition.
Moves to marketise the South Australian public
education bureaucracy are now underway, although they are not proceeding
as rapidly as they have in state health and welfare departments, and in
federal education arrangements where there is now a very clear separation
of policy making from provision ( the funder- purchaser -provider model).
Whole of public sector accrual accounting and results based budgeting,
together with efforts to standardise quality assurance reporting, have
been placed alongside corporatisation practices and many of the residual,
older bureaucratic procedures they seek to replace. These institutional
procedures and accountability requirements impact considerably on the work
of school Principals.
3. How educational and public sector reform
work together.
The educational policy of devolution appears
to open up a managerial space to Principals. However, the vulnerability
of government to media critique, the performance requirements of line managers,
the impost to minimise the risks of litigation and subsequent costs, new
accounting and accountability requirements,conspire against such autonomy.
Providers are not left to deliver the outcomes and the policy unencumbered.
A plethora of rules, documentation, monitoring and reporting requirements
increasingly enshrined in digital form tightly regulate management, and
the distance between decision makers and delivery exacerbates difficulties
in communication and information, and giving and receiving feedback. The
goals of flexible and holistic responsiveness are not met and morale suffers.
The policy of subsidiarity that in theory opens up managerial space for
Principal action is filled with bureaucratic accountability requirements,
rules, files, procedures, risk management processes, data collections and
performance requirements. Decentralisation in practice neither creates
the level of autonomy promised in policy nor supports innovation, supposedly
the purpose. This is not to suggest that Principals wish a return to the
former tight regulation of institutional policy levers but, rather, that
some loosening of low trust bureaucratic mechanisms is required. The gap
between policy rhetoric of autonomy and everyday reality of school administration
is one current source of alienation of school Principals from Central Office
and desire of some to move to American style Charters is indicative of
the depth of feeling about unnecessary bureaucratic imposts. In a climate
of increased criticism of the public education system, significant expansion
of the private school sector and an increasingly market driven approach
to enrolment and curriculum, further pressure is placed on Principals to
put what time and space they do have available into efforts to keep their
school, and the public education system, viable and in good public esteem.
Is this the only version of reform?
Reforms are often seen as either top down
or bottom up. Some reforms are based on theorisations of the effective
school. Our current reform is based around the public management policy
/implementation split, and educational institutional change. It is resolutely
top down and distant from schools. While these are the recipes found in
the management literature and in neo- liberal education policy, they run
counter to the newest educational research findings on successful school
reform. That it is so difficult for Principals to access this material,
which is largely reported in academic journals and conferences, is highly
indicative of :
the ways in which one- best policy solutions are prescribed by government
fiat, rather than discussion about policy options before decisions are
made and the increasing gap between university researchers and school practitioners.
The two programs - the NPDP and the National Schools
Network (37)- that bridged this gap and worked
actively on jointly funding local versions of reform - have now been abolished.
Current educational
reform research (38) strongly suggests that
reform and innovation require not only resources but some loosening of
controls. The message is that successful reform is driven by locally developed
and centrally supported educational and curriculum change. The literature
suggests that schools and their Principals are not merely implementers
of policies and that it is counter productive to see them as such. Nor
can they accommodate competing policy demands each of which acts as if
no other exists and the school is a blank page waiting to be written. The
emphasis in the research on student learning and professional involvement
in participatory processes speak strongly for a Principal who is focussed
on educational issues as the 'prime mover' of her/his practices.
What is also useful is what researchers have
discovered about reform failure (39)-
for example, the following are all problematic: