We know two basic things about the Irish education system. One is that it has been in many respects a great success, producing young people who are regarded around the world as smart, adaptable, able to apply their knowledge to a range of tasks.
The other is that it is in other respects a dreadful failure, producing a population in which one in four people is functionally illiterate. And this failure is not some kind of throwback to the days of a relatively poor and underdeveloped Ireland. Right now, in the midst of a tiger economy fuelled in part by a good education system, one pupil in 10 is emerging from primary school with significant literacy problems. And this figure has not improved in the last 20 years.
In attempting to explain this paradox and to understand what is happening in a key area of Irish society, the natural place to start is with schools. How are they performing? What is going on in the classroom? Why does the same system produce both wonderful and shameful results? How are teachers coping with the huge disparities in the lives of their pupils? But as soon as these questions are asked, teachers tend to put up a defensive wall. To put it mildly, the teachers' unions are not comfortable with the idea of accountability. They have so far maintained a policy that teachers must not be obliged to teach in the presence of an inspector. They are against any inspection scheme that aims to appraise the work of individual teachers and oppose any attempt to publish assessments of individual teachers or school examination results. The vague possibility that the talks on a new social partnership might include discussion of linking pay to performance has caused the ASTI to walk out of the ICTU. The TUI has been furiously hostile to the mild and careful Whole School Evaluation scheme, introduced on a pilot basis over the last two years.
Increasingly, what the public sees is a profession out of key with the demands of a more open society. At a time when every area of public life is being subjected to scrutiny, teachers seem extraordinarily sensitive about any move to evaluate their work. At a time when education has become the single most important determinant of economic success and failure, the system is resisting any real assessment of its own successes and failures. The system, in short, is currently unable to meet the very simple demand summed up in the brief for the Whole School Evaluation pilot project when it was launched in 1998: "it is essential that the Department of Education and Science is able to give public assurance regarding the quality of education provided in schools". Teachers have to face the fact that, in a 21st century democracy, this is not a lot to ask. Admittedly, resistance to State scrutiny of schools in Ireland has particular historic roots. Initially, when the system was developing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was hostility to the notion of Protestant inspectors paid by the British government poking their noses into the education of Irish Catholic children.
Subsequently, especially in relation to the secondary school sector, there was the notion that these are not public institutions but private bodies, owned and run by the churches. The Department of Education, even though it paid the salaries of teachers, adopted a timid, minimalist approach to anything that might be construed as interference in the church's proper domain. In his fascinating book Management and Control in Irish Education, Louis O'Flaherty quotes Richard Mulcahy, Minister for Education in 1956, dismissing his own role as that of a "kind of dungaree man, the plumber who will make the satisfactory communications and streamline the forces and potentialities of the educational workers." When the State approached the schools, in other words, it knocked respectfully at the tradesman's entrance.
Nor, for the most part, were parents - theoretically, the primary educators of their children - much more inclined to make demands. Both the church and teachers enjoyed a high social prestige. Teachers tended to be considerably better educated than the majority of parents. For the masses, education was a privilege, not a right. Asking schools to account for themselves was like asking God to account for the state of the world. But all of this has changed. The churches may remain in control of large parts of the education system, but that control is being lost. Schools are becoming, in all but name, public institutions. The State is both more self-confident and itself under increasing pressure to be accountable for the way it spends public money. The rudiments of a transparent democracy are emerging through the Freedom of Information Act, which gives the public access, not just to the workings of government, but to a whole range of State and semi-state bodies.
And while teachers rightly retain the respect of society at large, they are no longer regarded as authority figures with knowledge and brainpower beyond the comprehension of ordinary parents. In a society where most members of the public feel themselves entitled to ask questions of their doctors, their priests and their politicians, teachers can no longer expect to be beyond scrutiny. And it's not as if teachers themselves actually gain from the closed nature of the system. The irony, indeed, is that the lack of objective accountability serves to hide from the public the reality that teachers actually face and the things they actually achieve. It doesn't just protect the small handful of incompetent teachers. It also does an injustice to the majority of good teachers.
The public, for example, doesn't know what it's like to be faced in the first year of second-level school with students with an average reading age of nine or ten and to be expected to bring them to a point where they can write intelligently about Hamlet. The public isn't being told about poor managers or shabby school buildings. The warning signs that should be telling the public about conditions that fail children and thwart good teachers are not being erected. And it's not even as if the current opaque system has prevented the development of what teachers want to avoid: an educational marketplace based on odious comparisons and false assumptions. About half of Irish pupils do not attend the second-level school that is nearest or most accessible to them. That means that their parents are shopping around, making judgments on the basis of whatever information they can gather about the school and its teachers. All that the absence of objective evaluation of schools does is ensure that much of that information will be wrong. By not asking to be judged fairly and accurately, teachers end up creating a situation in which they are being judged largely on the basis of hearsay.
Does that mean that we should have crude league tables of exam results as they have in Britain? No. That system has been rightly summed up by Emer Smyth of the ESRI as one that "would in fact make inaccurate and misleading information available to parents" because it takes no account of the ability of the pupils coming in. Does it mean that there should be some kind of payment-by-results system in which teachers get bonuses based on the number of Agrades their students get? No. Such a system would have all the same distortions built into it and would actually discriminate against the best teachers - those who work with the most difficult students.
But being against the kind of crude, bureaucratic accounting that Margaret Thatcher inflicted on British teachers isn't enough. Instead of shoring up the defences, teachers ought to be shaping a creative response to the genuine need of parents and the public at large for transparency in a vital area of Irish life.
And here there is another irony. The evidence suggests that, for all the public defensiveness, Irish teachers actually like intelligent scrutiny. The response of individual teachers to the Whole School Evaluation pilot project has been quite favourable. Asked to rate a number of aspects of the scheme on a scale of one to five, teachers who took part in it gave positive ratings on most counts. They felt that the initial contact of inspectors with their classes "set both the pupils and myself at ease" and that a fair sample of their work was seen by the inspectors. The statement that "my overall experience of WSE has been very positive, there was a real sense of partnership and collaboration" drew a rating of 3.7 out of five. The statement that "WSE will contribute to improvement in our school" got the same response. The views of school principals were even more favourable. If anything, both teachers and principals wanted the inspection process to be longer, more detailed and less rushed.
Yet this is the same scheme that caused uproar at last year's TUI conference when delegate after delegate berated the union's leadership for co-operating with it at all. The conference "emphatically" rejected the scheme and instructed all members to have nothing to do with it. It is very hard to explain to the public why a teachers' union shows such disdain for a scheme that most teachers felt would improve the work of their school.
It is even harder to understand why a profession that has so many achievements to show off insists on creating the impression that it has something to hide.
