Governance as discourse
byIngólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson, University of Akureyri ()
Presentation at the European Conference on Educational Research in HAMBURG,
17–20 September 2003, held by Faculty of Educational Research, University of Hamburg. The paper is part of a symposium entitled Education Governanceand Europeanisation of Education Policy
Draft version based on a reading text—not for citations without authors' permission!
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I.
The paper describes the invasion of neo-liberal market-oriented language and practices into Icelandic education discourse. I describe here how language and practices unspeakable in the 1970s are now used by almost everyone to argue about how to manage schools and other educational matters. Contract management and other market-oriented practices, precise goals in the national curriculum, school-based self-evaluation, seeing students as individual consumers of education or even clinical diagnosis, information technology, new European statistical categories and so forth have been brought into the education as technological change rather than political change, an "inevitable" continuous progress, something that we do not need to really discuss. This discourse centers around that governance is a key to deal with problems: governance is the key to solve discipline problems, as well as special educational needs have become a problem of governance, while the child-centered discourse of equity and democracy was that key in the 1970s and 1980s.
The paper is drawn from materials in the Educational Governance and Social Integration/Exclusion study. We studied policy documents, took interviews with educators, and reinterpreted statistical information. This presentation is in part based on papers published in September 2002 in Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research but it also includes analyses of interviews that have not been published before.
This particular talk is focused on how governance has become discourse, a predominant language that is placed above issues of curriculum content as well as socio-economic and gender equality. At the end of the paper, I shall also compare the principles of legitimation in education discourse in the 1970s in one hand – and around the turn of the millennium in the other hand. By principles of legitimation I mean patterns of discursive themes that are structured in each of the historical junctures, not any "natural" order.
II.
How to govern schools used to be rather self-evident. An experienced teacher, who often had been the assistant principal, became the principal. No particular education was needed, but many had begun to see the importance of such education. (An example mentioned in the Hamburg talk is that now an early childhood education teacher only needs one year of educational administration courses to be able to become a primary school (6 to 16 years) principal. That is a far way from hiring the most senior teacher of the particular school to be the principal!)
Now we see discourse about that management and governing methods are the basis for good schools. We analyzed a document on contract management from 1993 where this type of ideology is defined for state and municipal institutions. That is to move market-based practices into all spheres under the rubric of accountability and budget reform. We also analyzed documents about self-evaluation and curriculum revision, finding that all documents aimed at creating consensus about political goals. Education is treated as technical matter where professionals determine what is most important. Methods of governance are one such issue that has become a defined area of expertise or professionalism.
In our interviews we heard that some of the principals had taken up this kind of discourse, they kind of "own" the methods. Other principals, especially in primary schools and also those not in Reykjavík and the neighborhood, had not. School-based self-evaluation had so little been implemented that there was little talk about it in the interviews, but the official document about it made it into a technical matter rather than a democratic issue. One instance is that teachers are not even mentioned in the document except if they are included in what is called "staff".
We have no particular doubts that school-based self-evaluation is important, but doubt that it is self-evident. We also doubt that expertise and professionalism of governing methods is self-evident. We doubt that budget reform and self-evaluation are inevitable. Those are political goals, possibly good goals but political.
III.
A principal in a rural school said this (in the spring of 1999):
"There is some movement that schools will create the positions of middle managers, division heads, heads of subject matter groups, who have designated roles as such, and then there is the assistant principal. This is to make things easier for the principal and the assistant principal ... by that we can create some time. I do not have to teach and the assistant principal has only six lessons teaching load a week. We would not have time to teach more than this. By having the middle managers there are tasks that we do not have to engage in ..."
A new question was raised about that the principals are now hired by the municipalities, and they are to hire teachers and others, make sure that the school house is properly served, etc.:
"I often experience that I must take position against the teachers because I am a manager. When it comes to money and salary matters, then we are the advocates of the municipality. How can we best use the money ... But we need the middle managers to take some of the pressures of the principal and the assistant principal."
IV.
A principal in the capital city area (also in the spring of 1999):
"Power has been moved ... the decentralization everyone talks about ... it is closer to the schools ... particularly in financial matters so that we can determine more in financial matters."
The principal continues, in a typical governance discourse:
"Assistant principals are now required to teach too much, and they tend to be stuck in how things used to be done ... this is not the same in every school but the number of managers must be increased. It was good when the year- and subject-matter division heads were established but they have limited resources in power and responsibility. I could think of some divisions in relation to students' age: youngest grades, middle grades, teenagers' grades. The division heads would assist principals ... they would take care of their division about day-to-day things, but the principal could delve more into policy issues ... If one tries to write up a plan of how the school is governed, and there is no hierarchy, everything is flat, every matter is under the principal, even a matter such as lost gloves will end on the principal’s desk."
These middle managers' positions have now been created in the contracts between the teacher unions and the municipalities. One of the consequences of this is definitely that there is an increasing gap between teachers and principals. I shall not delve into it here.
V.
I wish now to look at the interrelationship between the governance discourse and the discourse and practices of special needs education. How is it spoken about students' special educational needs? How are they governed?
The main practice of governing special needs education used to be to take students, especially disruptive boys, out of classrooms to teach them math and Icelandic, and this method is still widely used. There were also quite a few special education schools, but there are fewer of them now as the municipalities consider them expensive.
But now Iceland has created a policy derived from UNESCO'S 1994 Salamanca declaration about special needs education where inclusion of students into regular classrooms is the norm. Yet in addition to inclusion into regular classrooms and to take students out of classrooms for individual lessons, there are also many special needs departsments, and some primary schools specialize in the education of particular groups such those who are deaf, with autism, etc.
While there are many experts in the education of specifically labeled groups as well as teachers who have specialized in effective methods of inclusion, the hegemonic discourse on special needs education and inclusion is that of how to govern it. It has become important for the schools to find out how to receive more money if they have students with "expensive" special needs, money for assistant instructors, for creating support groups, for special needs departments, etc.
Municipalities are requested to allocate funds for special educational needs, and some municipalities such as Akureyri, where I live, allocate more money for those purposes without defining them for particular students. But the schools seek more money so they could cater to the needs of particular individuals, and for the smallest municipalities this is even a matter of life and death because they use so much of their income for the schools (up to two thirds or even more, if I have understood correctly). So that there is a specific fund from which municipalities can apply for but only if a sufficient diagnosis by medical doctors or psychologists is performed. We see here the conjunction of a budget discourse (at the heart of neo-liberalism) and a clinical discourse of diagnosing individual needs.
These are all international trends, as you notice from the other papers.
VI.
I wish to conclude this presentation by looking at the legitimating principles in the education discourse in the 1970s and now at the turn of the millennium.
In the 1970s and the 1980s the discourse on primary education in Iceland was characterized with child-centered views and democratic and equality principles. Cooperative learning, inquiry pedagogy, integration of subject matter, and alternative methods of assessment were the buzzwords. Yet scientist and technological practices of defining goals and precise curricula were also used, often to argue for the other goals.
Both these patterns were in opposition to the pre-reform discourse and practices based on strict separation into traditional subject matter (for instance zoology, botany, and human anatomy instead of biology or even natural sciences), congregational pedagogy, nationalism, beliefs in written tests, and themes about the fixed nature of knowledge and intelligence, excellence and achievement.
Today the discourse of technological solutions has won over the pre-reform discourse, at least to some extent, but equality and democracy sit on the side-lines at best. Inclusion, of course, is a matter of both equality and democracy, but as I just said, it has become a governance matter money and clinical diagnosis in the discourse. We see decentralizing discourse with the transfer of the primary schools to municipalities and school-based self-evaluation. The decentralizing is democratic to some extent; in this case it seems more a matter of how to govern than how to make things more democratic. Further, we see a market-oriented discourse with the emphasis on budget reform being more important than educational goals. And there is moral discourse with the emphasis of a lack of discipline which indeed should be a problem of teaching methods but not a moral issue.
This shift of discourse has also occurred in most other Western countries just in somewhat different shapes, and in our articles in the Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research in September 2002, Hannu Simola, Sverker Lindblad and I argue that it is more fundamental than for instance than the political proponents in Iceland, Finland, and Sweden would say. It is also often presented as technological as to create consensus about it. School-based self-evaluation could be a democratic tool, but it appears now as a technological trick in the policy documents.
Budget reform and clinical diagnosis are now presented as self-evident although they should be considered anything but inevitable! And is this progress?
Related websites (some of them include references)
Analyzed documents
Enn betri skóli. Þeirra réttur—okkar skylda. 1998, February. Reykjavík: Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture.
Enn betri skóli. Þeirra réttur—okkar skylda. 1998, April. Reykjavík: Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture
Sjálfsmat skóla. Leikskólar, grunnskólar, framhaldsskólar. 1997. Reykjavík: Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture.
Umbætur og nýskipan í ríkisrekstri. 1993. Reykjavík: Ministry of Finance.
Thanks to my cooperating researchers in Iceland: Guðrún Geirsdóttir of the University of Iceland; Gunnar E. Finnbogason, Ólafur J. Proppé, and Sigurjón Mýrdal, Iceland University of Education, Reykjavík. Other countries in the comparative research were, besides Finland and Sweden, Australia, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and the U.K. (England and Scotland).