The Calculated Teacher: Value-Added Models, Rubrics, and the Disciplined Self

• In Event: 68.029 - Key Teacher Evaluation/Accountability System Components: Using Diverse Methods to Inform Practice and Policy

Abstract

Purpose

There is little dispute that market-based logics have had a profound influence on education policy over the past several decades (Ball, 2003, 2015; Clark, 2013; Furlong, 2004; Rose, 1989). One manifestation of this is in contemporary teacher evaluation systems that rely on numerical indicators of teacher performance (e.g., rubrics and value-added models (VAMs)), so as to render teacher quality visible, measurable, and comparable. The purpose of this study was to understand the ways in which such evaluation systems discursively remake the “teacher” into a calculable object of knowledge, conditioning the possibilities for teacher performance (Ball, 2003).

Perspectives

In Stephen Ball’s (2003) seminal piece – The Teacher's Soul and the Terrors of Performativity – he argued that market logics have fundamentally reconfigured education via a set of performativity technologies that “employ judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic)” (p. 216). Teachers “know” themselves as relational subjects to others (e.g., colleagues, students) (Rose, 1989), which is made determinable by numbers and categories of judgment (e.g., exemplary, proficient, unsatisfactory). Teachers know their performative worth and are incentivized (again, materially and symbolically) to undertake “intensive work on the self” (Dean, 1995, p. 581) to be excellent and exceptional teachers (Ball, 2003).

Methods

This is a case study of one large, urban middle school that uses a comprehensive evaluation system – the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement (NIET, 2011). Employing a discursive analytic method that draws on Ball’s (2003) performativity framework and Foucault’s (1980) “regime of truth,” I used teacher and evaluator interviews (n=11), as well as policy and system protocol documents (e.g., evaluator handbooks, training materials) to unpack the ways in which this particular evaluation system has set the conditions for disciplined teacher performance.

Results

Teacher-participants within this district have been remade into “enterprising subjects” (Rose, 1989) who are self-regulative, self-calculative, and are constantly striving for self improvement. Evaluative instruments and practices (e.g., student growth models/VAMs, rubrics, observations, conferences) provide the “knowledge” they need to act upon themselves and “add value” to their practice and worth.

Significance

The case presented herein is but one manifestation of a complete reconceptualization of education at large. This evaluation system is consistent with a series of policy mechanisms that function to remake school subjects (e.g., students, teachers) into market-oriented individuals who are incentivized to compete against others and consistently work upon themselves to be excellent and exceptional. “The novelty of this epidemic of reform is that it does not simply change what people, as educators, scholars and researchers do, it changes who they are” (Ball, 2003, p. 215). This “epidemic” is far-reaching, currently affecting students, teachers, and schools around the globe. As such, it is critical to understand how this “knowledge” about teachers gets produced, but also how it comes to be taken as “truth” (Foucault, 1980).

Author

• Jessica Holloway, Deakin University