CRISIS IN TEACHING: Trying to measure teachers' performance will damage education, writes former ASTI president, Bernadine O'Sullivan
The concerns raised by Dr Ciaran Cosgrove of Trinity College Dublin and Professor James Heffron, chairman of NUI Convocation, in relation to the Skilbeck report on universities mirror the educational concerns raised by ASTI members in relation to benchmarking. As they rightly point out, the educational praxis spawned in Thatcher's Britain, which caused untold educational misery in the third-level sector there, is now set to infiltrate its grubby agenda into Euro-Ireland. The type of measuring and testing which will be required under benchmarking to measure a teacher's "productivity" will put the same unfortunate emphasis on education as a commodity requiring costly, bureaucratic evaluation.
Increasingly, the language in debates on education, social provision and health does not reflect what public-sector professionals are really about. Students, parents and patients are referred to as the "consumers" of our education, health and social service systems. This is presuming, in the education area, for example, that every student and every parent bring the same ability, background and motivation to the system.
The difficulties of applying to education, or indeed any of the caring professions, these systems of accountability and management are apparent. How do we apply "quality assurance" and "quality control", "input-output models", "bottom-line evaluation" and "value for money" systems of assessment in a school which is required by the Education Act to have an entrance policy which encompasses all students and whose mission statement gives a commitment that the school shall provide for the spiritual, social, academic and physical needs of the students?
Teaching at any level involves two parties, the teacher and the taught. In the words of Professor Gearoid Ó Tuathaigh of NUI Galway, who addressed the ASTI's annual convention as the guest speaker of our dearly beloved and recently deceased former president Sean Higgins: "Teaching is not an action but a transaction, not an outcome but a process, not a performance but an emotional and intellectual connection between teacher and learner. It cannot be assessed by any single dimension of quality, nor cannot be assessed at all without deep knowledge of the setting, styles and the orientation of the teachers and of the character and diversity of the students and long-term effects. These may be very different from what students report about teaching as they experience it."
Writing in the Guardian (January 30th, 2001) four professors who had just received full marks for their teaching of economics at Warwick University described the whole assessment process as "damaging and destructive". Their experience was that "The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) did not enhance teaching quality in universities. Its mission is to promote public confidence that quality of provision and standards of awards in higher education are being safeguarded and enhanced. Its there to 'assure' not 'ensure'. The whole thing is a highly expensive public relations exercise." The professors estimated that the hidden costs of QAA regulation at third level are of the order of £100 million sterling a year.
Is this going to happen here? The newly-established Centre for Partnership and Performance will monitor performance right across the public sector. Will monies that should be directed at improving the student-teacher ratio and counselling and guidance, providing places to which social workers can make referrals, providing hospital beds and paying these caring professionals a reasonable salary, instead be used to fund a self-serving bureaucracy? Will bureaucratic monitoring and demands for paper trails enhance these services?
Benchmarking is radical new system which governments across Europe wish to impose on their public services. Target-setting, performance indicators (in education, school plan and whole school evaluation will be used to establish these), regrading and restructuring will justify increases for the few, and be used as a device to deprive pensioners of increases.
Is benchmarking going to replace national wage agreements and cost-of-living increases? The way in which the salary increases of TDs and senators were marketed as benchmarking during our pay campaign was highly organised and deliberately misleading. They had, in fact, established a relativity, their conditions were not taken into account and they certainly did not have to show productivity.
The ferocity of the attacks on the ASTI can be explained by the determination of the Government - and others hostile to public-service pay - to deliver us into a system which was set up to replace relativities with a process more useful to the Government. Our members are to be congratulated for their steadfastness in the face of a sustained campaign of vilification and misinformation.
The central and crucial recommendation of the recent report of the Public Service Commission on Pensions is that pension parity no longer be maintained. An index of public-service salary increases will be established. Traditionally, pension was related to core pay and one's pension was related to the serving member's salary. In this new scenario, if a serving member gets a 6 per cent increase and the public service index is 3 per cent, then the retired person will get just 3 per cent.
Like the professors, committed teachers do not intend, on either education or trade-union grounds, to accept a Thatcherite strategy undertaken for economic reasons only, in which neither student nor teacher would be the winner and which would cause long-term damage to our excellent education system.
•Bernadine O'Sullivan, a former president of the ASTI, is a candidate in the NUI panel for the Seanad elections. Her term on the ASTI standing committee expired last Easter.
