Transparency and Opacity: Levinasian Reflections on Accountability in Australian Schooling

Abstract

This article draws on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to consider, from an ethical perspective, the current transparency and accountability agenda in Australian schooling. It focuses on the case of the My School website and the argument that transparent publication of comparative performance data via the website provides a basis for making things better in schooling. The article argues that while technologies of accountability may have potential benefits, they cannot provide a basis for this ethical project. Instead, the ethical experience described by Levinas arises from an encounter with opacity in the face-to-face relation with the Other, who is harshly illuminated by the transparency promised through calculation and comparison. Such encounters with opacity hold the potential to disrupt the politics of visibility promoted by transparency agendas and provide an alternative to the growing practice of ‘accountability at a distance’ based on performance data.

Keywords:

• Levinas
• accountability
• Other
• My School

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bob Lingard, Mary Lou Rasmussen and the two anonymous referees for their generous engagement with and helpful comments on this article and the special issue in which it is published. I would also like to thank Richard Niesche for his efforts to bring this special issue together, as well as Christina Gowlett and Carmen Mills for their contributions to our discussions about theorising accountabilities in Australian schooling.

Notes

1. This is the position of Levinas. However, Calarco (2010) argues that the logic of his argument can be extended to nonhumans, while philosophers aligned with the object-oriented ontology movement, such as Morton (2010), provide interesting arguments regarding the opacity of objects with potential ethical implications.

2. This example is drawn from the findings of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP100200841) titled ‘Pursuing equity in high poverty rural schools: improving learning through rich accountabilities.’ The project is a collaboration between The University of Queensland, Victoria University and the Queensland Department of Education and Training. The Chief Investigators are Professor Bob Lingard, Professor Martin Mills and Professor Peter Renshaw, with Dr Sam Sellar as Project Manager, from The University of Queensland, and Professor Marie Brennan and Dr Lew Zipin from Victoria University.