LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMNS
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.3 THEORITCAL AND ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
2.3.3 NEW MANAGERIALISM AND NPM IN EDUCATION
Within education it is possible to identify a new institutionalized culture which displays most if not all the trappings of NPM, ‘new managerialism’ and ‘corporate
managerialism’. In various parts of the world education has been restructured and regulated following NPM principles. The dismantling of central educational bureaucracies, the devolution of education to schools, school-based management, enhanced parental choice, increased community involvement in schools have introduced a market element into education services. The term ‘quasi-markets’ is increasingly being used to characterize attempts to introduce market forces and private decision-making into education services (Fleisch 2002:162, Martin 2002: 130).
This is captured in the following quote:
For the new manager in education, good management involves the smooth and efficient implementation of aims set outside the school, within
constraints also set outside the school. It is not the job of the new manager to question or criticize these aims and constraints. The new management discourse in education emphasizes the instrumental purposes of schooling – raising standards and performance as measured by examination results, levels of attendance and school-leaver destinations – and is frequently articulated within a lexicon of enterprise, excellence, quality and
effectiveness ( Gewirtz and Ball cited in O’Brein and Down 2002: 112).
The impact of NPM on schools typically involves:
• more open school enrolment policies intended to allow quasi-market competition;
• self-management;
• changes to teacher and school leader’s pay, condition and training;
• curriculum prescriptions;
• external evaluation of schools through inspection or review;
• an emphasis on testing, target-setting and performance management; and
• numerous interventions into ‘failing schools’. (Thrupp & Wilmott 2003: 37)
The focus of NPM is now more than ever on the ‘new class’ of public sector professional employees who staff the school and who must ensure its continued
growth. This has given rise to the management of the performance of these employees.
One of the arguments of this study is that systemic education reform movements like neo- liberalism exert an important influence on teacher education and teachers. World-wide reform tendencies such as privatization and decentralization have produced a growing tendency towards the engineering of standards, quality control and accountability mechanisms. Formal and informal quality control and accountability mechanisms have been created or reinforced in order to secure compliance with globally determined standards of quality via teacher learning and practice. Examples of these are the development of new standards for recruiting and selecting teachers into the profession, re-designed curricula, new systems of accreditation and certification, incentives and rewards linked to performance, standards for primary and secondary education in subjects considered essential to compete in the global market and so on. Pressure for
accountability and ‘performativity’, etc. may have squeezed out important areas for teacher development. This study defines teacher development broadly, encompassing the teacher’s lifecycle and focusing on continuous professional development. Thus teacher education includes formal and informal initiatives as well as those used to provide pre- service education and on-going professional development.
South Africa has not been immune to the changes taking place internationally. Since the democratization of education in 1994 there have been various changes taking place consistent with the ideology of NPM. The South African Schools Act 84 0f 1996 allows for schools to be decentralized with communities being given the power to participate in school governance through democratically elected School Governing Bodies who have the power to set user fees and appoint SGB paid educators in order to improve efficiency in service delivery and improve responsiveness to learner needs. The principal of a ‘self- reliant’ or ‘self-managing’ school is expected to play the role of the CEO, PRO and financial manager who is in competition with other schools for learners, engages in fund- raising, increases efficiency by doing more with less and is very result-orientated.
It would be fair to say all the points mentioned above have been felt by South African schools. Our focus being performance management and teacher evaluation, the present system of PM in South Africa, the IQMS with its unabashedly managerialist orientation is a performance measurement strategy designed to enhance the quality of education in schools framed by the discourses of the private sector, namely, accountability,
performance standards, performance criteria, and financial incentives in the form of salary increases linked to pay and grade progression based on performativity. It is a quality assurance mechanism to the client that she is receiving a good educational equivalent for her outlay. The managerial task would involve maximizing the output of the human component. At school level it is aimed at changing the culture of the school to a performance culture.6
New managerialism, according to Bottery (2000), does not only feed back into the
workings of the invariably minimalist state to influence the thoughts and actions of policy makers, it has also has damaging effects on society at large. He argues that it reduces first order social and moral values to second order. Such first order values include
6 The use of reculturing the school is championed in particular by Michael Fullan and parallels the rise of culturalism in business.
autonomy, care, tolerance, equality, respect and trust. First order values are regarded as an integral and primary feature of any human relationship. Managerialism in education is therefore anti-humanitarian:
Just as in business, where targets are set beyond the reachable, so are they increasingly being set in education. Stress is then caused by the pressure to achieve them (Bottery 2000: 68).
In essence, education has adopted most of the premises of new managerialism, many of its objectives and almost all its methods of delivering them. Competition, choice and performance remain the unchallenged totems of policy. It is interesting to note that the emphasis on compliance with quality management and other state-imposed policies has not supplanted the competitive model of separate self-managing schools with devolved budgets. Education remains outcomes-based. How these outcomes are achieved is of little concern. The skill of individual teachers is viewed as a kind of enterprise
underpinned by performance-related pay. Quality and performance management systems like the IQMS focus school leadership on the core tasks of enhancing pupil progress through measurable criteria.
A critical examination of the IQMS policy has given rise to the following key concerns which have arisen due to its managerialist orientation:
• The growing compliance of teachers by promoting their compliance with reform;
• It promotes the decline of the teacher as a professional educator given the
contention that making sure people are well trained then left to get on with the job is ruled out of contention;
• It is too technicist to take much account of the social dimension of education.
• It underplays the social context and assumes that failures are located in the institution and its staff;
• It is often anti-educational by not focusing enough on pedagogy and curriculum and by encouraging inappropriate links to business;
• It is often illusionary as it offers promises of autonomy for education managers but fails to address the problem of governments steering from the distance;
• It distracts from more important educational and social justice issues.
These concerns are expressed even in first world economies ( see Trupp and Willmont 2003) so one would expect that in a developing state like South Africa with its differing socio-economic contexts these concerns will be exacerbated.
In fairness to the IQMS policy, one must acknowledge that some of the assumptions underpinning it are inherently positive and progressive, for example, teacher
development and whole school development as well as professional growth and continuous improvement. The procedure manual for the IQMS states that evaluation is not apart from but part of the educational process. The IQMS also seeks to meet professional standards for sound quality management, including ‘propriety (ethical and legal)’, ‘utility (useable and effective’, ‘feasibility (practical, efficient and cost
effective)’, and ‘accuracy’, and promote the ‘individual professional growth of educator’s with development taking place within a Human Resource Development strategy and Skills Development’ (IQMS Collective Agreement Number 8 of 2003: 1). High standards and successful schools are worthy goals that one should be encouraged to pursue.
However, one must acknowledge that the IQMS’ managerial orientation has resulted in a tension between its ‘developmental’ goals and ‘accountability’ and how this tension is managed will be an imperative for its success.