The "Power" of Value-Added Thinking: Exploring the Ideological Basis of Recent Brazilian Educational Policies in Market-Based Logic

• In Event: 58.018 - Market-Based Teacher Accountability Policies and Practices: Global Perspectives and Critiques

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to ethnographically document the market-based ideological assumptions of Rio de Janeiro’s educational policymakers, and the ways in which those assumptions have informed these policymakers’ decision to implement value-added modeling-based teacher evaluation policies.

Perspectives

This inductive study draws on the anthropological literature on meaning making (Anderson-Levitt, 2012). Anthropologists argue that individuals make meaning within their cultural worlds through shared behavioral norms, common understandings, and other types of shared knowledges or beliefs (see Anderson-Levitt, 2002; Fischer, 2007; Strauss & Quinn, 1998). In this particular study, my interest focuses on the common understandings and ideological assumptions regarding “good” teacher education practice that undergird the policymaking decisions of Rio de Janeiro’s public education policymakers.

Methods

This paper draws on a larger year-long ethnographic study of the ideologies directing contemporary teacher education policy in Rio de Janeiro. Specifically, this paper draws on 66 ethnographic interviews with public sector administrators, public school teachers and educational nonprofit workers operating in Rio’s public schools. These interviews primarily focused on these individuals’ beliefs and perceptions regarding “good” teacher education policy and practice, as well as their perceptions of the teacher education policies put in place by the then-current Secretariat of Education in Rio.

Findings

On the basis of these interviews, I argue that the then-current Secretariat of Education was run primarily by people who subscribed heavily to what I call market logic, or the notion that ideas and services that come from private companies and nonprofits are inherently superior to those provided by the public sector. I further argue, and will explore in this paper, the ways in which Rio’s implementation of value-added modeling and high-stakes accountability-based teacher evaluation mechanisms reflects this latent ideological basis in market logic.

Significance

An extensive existent literature (see Edwards & DeMatthews, 2014 Gluz et al., 2014) has documented the influence of neoliberal currents in policy and ideology, from the Washington Consensus of the late twentieth century (Gore, 2000) to the present day, on the educational policies of Latin American countries, including Brazil. A parallel literature argues that neoliberal ideology undergirds most contemporary Brazilian public policy (Leher, 2003), including education policy (Afonso, 2013; Gatti, 2013). What the present study contributes to this larger body of work is an ethnographic exploration of how such neoliberal ideology is enacted, particularly in the teacher education policies of the public education sector of Rio de Janeiro.

Author

• Rolf Straubhaar, Texas State University - San Marcos