Education Professionalism and the Quest for Accountability

<p>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. </p><p>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. </p>