“Schooling” performance measurement: The politics of governing teacher conduct in Australia

Abstract

Performance measurement (PM) in the public sector has progressively broadened to cover the operation of professionals traditionally framed as independent and autonomous. How PM reconstitutes the role and conduct of professionals is critical for understanding contemporary dynamics of policy and governance, and service provider–service user relationships. Building on Lipsky's classic Street-level Bureaucracy, this paper examines the ways in which street-level professionals are reconfigured in their roles as evidenced by the operation of Australia's schooling PM, NAPLAN. The paper reports findings from a project examining the effects of PM in social policy. Attention is given to the ambiguous and conflicting goals arising from measuring literacy and numeracy performance and the varied ways performance numbers are used by management for teacher governance at the street-level. These considerations have implications for the effectiveness of PM in delivering service improvements, the experience of service users, and the achievement of policy objectives.

1 Introduction

It is now over 30 years since Lipsky's (1980) influential book, Street-level Bureaucracy, inaugurated a new conceptual lens and research agenda (Brodkin, 2012). Lipsky's achievement was to turn analysis to the operation of policy in the everyday interaction between service delivery agencies and service users. This standpoint was a response and a challenge to public administration scholarship at the time that attributed failed policy implementation to the breakdown of top-down administration. Instead, Lipsky's argued that to understand the effects of policy one must focus on its enactment by professionals and administrators processing applications and delivering services. He controversially stated that policy decisions are made at ground level, where government actors interact with citizens. The street-level perspective has generated a widely used nomenclature and an ongoing research agenda that remains apposite to contemporary policy research (see for example Brodkin, 2012; Meyers & Vorsanger, 2003; Tummers & Bekkers, 2014).

Lipsky made some pertinent observations about the role of performance measurement (PM) within street-level bureaucracies. These observations include organisations having multiple and ambiguous performance goals, the development of surrogate performance measures, and the problems of interpreting performance numbers. In addition, Lipsky also recognised that appropriate performance measurement can be an important tool in managing street-level workers. However, the depth, breadth and complexity of performance measurement have grown exponentially since Lipsky's original work. Accompanying these developments have been the advent of New Public Management (NPM) and the exponential growth of electronic information and communication technologies. Given these significantly changed organisational contexts, it is meaningful to reflect on contemporary considerations of PM in street-level bureaucracies and organisations. Indeed, to what extent do the observations of the past still have some validity, and what new insights and challenges do contemporary settings provide?

It could be argued that in some cases PM has displaced formal policy in resolving social problems. As such, it is likely that the roles of street-level workers are being transformed as the political, ethical and power effects of PM take effect. However, the implications of these developments for street-level delivery of publicly funded services have not been thoroughly examined. Yet this is critical for understanding the contemporary dynamics of policy and governance, the relationship between the state, public service providers and service users and the achievement public policy objectives.

In the context of this special edition, the paper engages with the lower reaches of Lewis’ (2015) chain of performance measurement via its consideration of how local contextual conditions can shape the actions of street-level professionals. Lewis articulates a ‘chain’ of performance measurement flowing from broad macro settings, including context and policy and criteria, through rules and understandings, to actions, outputs and consequences. Moreover, rather than take a systemic view of the PM system, this paper examines these dynamics at a localised level, where local context and settings mediate macro ones (Hupe & Buffat, 2014). Lewis (2015) also importantly contrasts a dominant ‘rational-scientific’ perspective on performance measurement with a ‘realistic-political’ perspective.

These dynamics are illustrated by analysing Australia's schooling PM. The National Assessment Program — Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN) is an initiative directed at providing parents, teachers, school administrators, state and federal governments with information about student (and school and teacher) performance in literacy and numeracy. Case studies of two schools, from two different socio-economic communities are presented. The purpose of these two different case study schools is to understand the potential multiple ways in which educational PM positions teachers and schools, the varied responses of such professionals and their managers, and the interaction with socio-economic context. Their selection from the extreme ends of the socio-economic spectrum is in no way held to be representative of high or low socio-economic schools, their teachers and their managers, nor do they posit a continuum between them. Rather, they seek to illustrate the diversity, and offer potential insights into the role of contextual factors in these dynamics. In doing so they add nuance and complexity to the conceptual understanding of the political dynamics of PM.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. We begin with Lipsky's insights on the operation of performance measurement at the street-level. The second section outlines NAPLAN, and the third outlines the project from which empirical data reported in this paper are drawn. The next two sections present key themes about teachers’ experience of PM within schools, namely ambiguous and conflicting goals, and the use of performance data in the management of teachers. The paper's concluding discussion draws out the politics and consequences of PM for street-level professionals and the implications for public service organisations and service users.

2 Street-level bureaucracy, performance measurement and schooling

In undertaking a street-level perspective of PM, it is informative to return to Lipsky's original work (1980, chap. 4, pp. 162–172). He observed the existence of myriad and ambiguous goals operating at street-level and three areas of conflict: between client-centred versus social engineering goals, client-centred versus organisational goals and contradictory role expectations. Moreover, often the activity of street-level agencies is not readily quantifiable, such as service user wellbeing and service quality. Further, the outcomes to which street-level workers seek to achieve are often affected by a range of factors beyond their control meaning that interpreting measurements of performance is fraught. Specifically, it is highly problematic to attribute any particular activity as the cause of change in measured performance. As a consequence, Lipsky observes that “street-level bureaucrats’ performance often eludes effective evaluation” (1980, p. 49).

This difficulty does not, however, mean that measurements of street-level performance are not attempted, nor undertaken, nor even that it should not be done: “street-level bureaucracies do seize on some aspects of performance to measure. They tend to seek reports on what can be measured as a means of exercising control” (1980, p. 51). Thus, easy to count phenomena and readily available data — such as numbers of client encounters, educational qualifications of staff and years of experience — are used as approximations of performance or quality. But this increased attempt at control by managers of street-level bureaucrats is not an unproblematic endeavour. Lipsky opined that measurements of performance immediately define concrete goals that street-level actors are likely to concentrate on: “If teachers are assessed or even remotely evaluated on the proportion of their charges who pass year-end examinations, more will pass as teachers ‘teach the test”’ (1980, p. 166). However, given the multiplicity and ambiguity of goals in street-level agencies, this can displace other important goals, or indeed create goal-conflict in the minds of street-level workers.

Consequently, iatrogenic problems include “inducing behaviour to conform to the measure, neglecting other responsibilities, and inauthentically performing according to the measured standards” (1980, p. 167). Accordingly, performance results may construct a veneer of performance and accountability.

Thus, the experiences of street-level actors in the contemporary, post-NPM, quasi-marketised and hyper-quantified settings are not unique. However, there have been several developments that have meant that with regard to performance measurement “the dilemmas that Lipsky first identified three decades ago have intensified” (Brodkin, 2012, p. 945). What is labelled NPM, that is business management practices and market mechanisms, has been more widely utilised in the public sector and indeed in the delivery of public services. Part of the NPM agenda is giving localised managers greater freedom to manage accountability, not by rules but by performance improvement targets. An associated dimension to this development is the greater use of outsourcing and contracting, which again is often governed by performance outcomes. Both these shifts have also meant that managers have had a greater imperative to more clearly assess and direct street-level actors and constrain or recast their discretionary conduct. Brodkin observes that “As the search for ways to manage street-level organisations has advanced in the past few decades, arguably few strategies have expanded as dramatically as the use of performance measurement…the practice of managing by performance measurement has become virtually ubiquitous” (2012, p. 945).

As Lipsky and other street-level researchers have noted (Brodkin, 2008; Meyers & Vorsanger, 2003), the drive to insert PM into street-level practice is largely based on an attempt at managing and governing street-level actors and the discretion they exercise. This need to govern is both about ensuring effectiveness, but also about collective and individual accountability.

3 Australia's educational performance measurement: NAPLAN

As a federated state, Australia's schooling context is complex. Australia's six states and two territory governments have constitutional authority to maintain their own public education systems, thus a national system of schooling does not exist. There is also a sizeable non-government school sector, accounting for about 30 percent of students, made up of Catholic, elite and other independent schools. Whilst the Federal government provides some needs-based school funding for state and territory schools, they do not hold constitutional responsibility for education policy (Jamrozik, 2009; Kenway, 2006). States, which are constitutionally responsible for policy and delivery of schooling, are dependent on the Federal government for educational funding. Thus, education is a shared, but asymmetric responsibility of governance in Australia that sets the context for potential State compliance with national policy direction (Lingard, 2000). Accordingly, over the last few decades there has been an evident increase in centralisation in terms of curriculum (Masters, 2010), accreditation of teacher education courses and teaching registration (Gillard, 2009).

Until recently, Australia's approach to school accountability was based on States producing their own approaches to reviewing schools with varying degrees of independent or external verification and systems of reporting (Gurr, 2007). NAPLAN, as a national approach for assessing the performance of Australia's schooling, has arisen from the aforementioned complex educational arrangements. Other pressures include international trends that position large-scale assessment as a form of litmus test for systemic health (Masters, 2005, 2007; OECD, 2010), neo-liberal reforms in education (Connell, 2013) and addressing Australia's declining relative performance in OECD testing regimes since 2000.

NAPLAN takes a census approach. Annually, all Australian school students are tested in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy administered by classroom teachers under strict protocols. A NAPLAN Summary report is published and individual student reports are sent to parents. Aggregated results at school and grade level are published on a specialised and prominent website, www.MySchool.edu.au. The Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA), an independent government statutory body, has responsibility for the development, management and administration of both NAPLAN and the My School website. Whilst publishing results on the website intensifies PM effects and generated substantive concerns (Mills, 2015; Niesche, 2015), our focus is on the actual PM. Indeed, My School was not a dominant concern within our studied schools.

4 Research project and data

The findings presented in this paper draw from a larger project on PM in Australian social policy. Participants in the schooling part of the project include federal and state senior bureaucrats, interest groups, state level managers, school level administrators, teachers and parents. Given, the street-level focus this paper pays particular attention to the teachers and principals within the study.

The schooling case study data was collected in 2013 in the Australian state of Queensland; five years after NAPLAN's initial implementation. Queensland's relative underperformance in NAPLAN testing was widely recognised following the first reporting of NAPLAN results in 2008. In response, the Queensland government commissioned a review of primary school education (Masters, 2009) that swiftly led to major structural reforms, teaching and learning audits, improvement targets and a renewed focus on school leadership. Consequently, improvement of student, teacher and state performance in Queensland state schools acutely focused on principal management of teaching and learning activities.

Two government primary school case sites, within one Queensland education region, were purposively selected in light of well documented correlations between socio-economic status and literacy levels: one in a high socio-economic community; and one in a low socio-economic community. Across these two schools, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four school managers (e.g. principals, deputies) and nine classroom teachers. Interview questions explored different aspects of performance measurement such as data production, usage and reporting and their organisational and individual consequences. The questions sought participant experiences of school–parent relationships with NAPLAN. The management and analysis of thematically coded data drew on Miles and Huberman (1994), involving processes of data reduction and data display to facilitate conclusion drawing, and was assisted using NVIVO.

Situated in an affluent, metropolitan suburb, with a stable homogeneous student body, Woodlands State School's student population has significant socio-educational advantage; four-fifths are located in the Australia's top quartile of households, and a tenth has a non-English speaking background.

In contrast, Edgefield State School is located in a disadvantaged metropolitan area with students’ from a wide range of minority communities residing in nearby public and low cost housing. Three-quarters of students are located in the bottom quartile of Australian households, and over a half have non-English speaking backgrounds. Increasing numbers of refugee students with limited or no English, stalled or restricted education, and traumatic personal experiences requiring daily attention are challenging issues for the school.

5 Ambiguous and conflicting goals at the street-level

Consistent with the work of Lipsky, school teachers experienced ambiguous and conflicting professional goals arising from NAPLAN, though the expression of this varied between the two case study schools. The delivery of education services is frequently muddied by competing philosophies as to the purpose of education and compounded by the politics of reform (Ball, 2003). This is further complicated by increased accountability via the use of performance measures. The focal points of tension described by Lipsky acknowledge the political nature of performance measures apparent clash with the logic of professional judgement. At one level, a performance measure is regarded as a proxy, partial or indicative measure for a wider performance objective or goal, yet in doing so that very measure can displace the wider goal to become the actual goal. The proxy becomes the goal. At another level, there is often ambiguity about what the wider goal actually is. For clarity to prevail, this ambiguity can lead to a further focusing on the measure. Goal tensions are especially felt by professionals who prescribe to wider professional goals alongside organisational ones.

These dynamics are evident in the case study schools, whereby the import of NAPLAN is locally enacted by teachers as they navigate multiple layers of accountability in response to their divergent student populations and contexts. Their contexts provide some indication of what teachers are held to account for, and to whom they are accountable (Brodkin, 2008).

At the national political and policy level there has been a history of multiple and changing purposes for NAPLAN and what it seeks to do, both technically and politically. The authority overseeing NAPLAN and its reporting depict the assessment as a simple apolitical measurement exercise:

It should be emphasised that NAPLAN is a tool to inform school improvement, not an improver of educational outcomes. It is not the test that will improve students’ literacy and numeracy skills, but the way students’ results (including school, system and national level results) are used by teachers, schools and systems to identify strengths and weaknesses, particularly in teaching practices and programs, that will improve student outcomes. The measure of NAPLAN's success will always be the uses to which the resulting data are put to improve teaching and learning (ACARA, 2013, p. 7).

At the same time, ACARA has various stated that it is diagnostic of individual educational performance and then shied from this remark. It is noted that educational performance is equated with literacy and numeracy, and educational performance with school performance; thus proxies displace goals.

This technical construct of NAPLAN sits uncomfortably alongside its policy and political construction. The original political architects of NAPLAN, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and his then Deputy and Minister for Education Julia Gillard, saw national testing as a strategy to support more efficient and effective investment of Commonwealth funding (such as targeting funding where it is most needed), and improving student performance to drive productivity (Rudd & Gillard, 2008). A key component of this vision was the opportunity for NAPLAN to crystallise choice for parents by providing rigorous data on school performance. Other policy-political imperatives include raising the performance of students from low socio-economic backgrounds (Dawkins, 2012), the establishment of a centralised system of State and Territory accountability (Zanderigo, Dowd, & Turner, 2012), strengthening of the education market and the creation of a national education policy field (Lingard, 2010).

At the case study schools, there was a similar ambiguity about the goal of NAPLAN. Coalface interpretations alternatively accepted, rejected or resisted the role of the high-stakes testing in changing professional activity and norms, accountability, professional learning and decision making. At times, explicit resistance or rejection of some NAPLAN goals accompanied actions that implicitly accepted others, signifying the complex process through which the teachers made sense of their practice (Meyers & Vorsanger, 2003). These disparities within and across the schools’ staff reflect the disjointed discourse on the purpose of NAPLAN that appears to have characterised its general implementation (Senate Standing Committee on Education and Employment, 2014). Concomitant with these ambiguous goals, was a shifting construction of who the performer is whose performance is measured — the student, the teacher or the school — mirroring the multiple macro level messages. However, at the street-level, the goals of NAPLAN were overshadowed by teachers’ construction of their professional goals vis-à-vis NAPLAN. These professional goals were significantly shaped by the exigencies of everyday practice within their local student and management contexts.

5.1 Woodlands State School

NAPLAN performance and the prospects of individual student success weighed heavily on Woodlands’ teachers as they situated themselves as mediators of competing agendas seeking to shape children's agency. One year 3 teacher illustrated a typical sentiment expressed throughout the interviews:

I make sure that my kids are not so much protected from NAPLAN, but I make sure my kids aren’t exposed to you know, “Oh my god, it's the biggest thing you’re ever going to do” (Teacher W1)

In saying so, this teacher differentiated NAPLAN testing from the political dimensions of high-stakes testing. Professional action, in this instance was directed at resisting the adultification of childhood via academic expectations, pressures and stress and precocious knowledge (Bousfield & Ragusa, 2014).

Despite most Woodlands’ students performing well above national averages, each teacher interviewed was aware of the importance of individual student performances to parents aiming to enrol their children in private schools. This parent concern as a driver of their professional practice is reflected in one teacher's account of parental interest in classroom practice:

I think the parents certainly just want the best for their kids. It's not necessarily, “They have to achieve this mark,” but they certainly take more of an interest in how they’re doing… to push them up to that level and what kind of predictions they might come up with. (Teacher W3)

Arguably, the strong and consistent parental sentiment on the value of good NAPLAN performances perceived by the staff created a commitment to have students ready and able to achieve solid NAPLAN scores. In this respect, preparing for testing was perceived as a professional responsibility. Yet, teachers recognised students as capable of delivering impressive scores in NAPLAN testing, resulting from highly educated, educationally engaged and economically advantaged parents. Such ‘learning-ready’ students at Woodlands clearly posed no impediment to the teachers’ capacity to undertake their professional role to educate. Accordingly, the setting and reaching of targets to meet school and institutional goals was professionally feasible, built on an assumption that student performance reflected teacher performance. In this respect, the teachers positioned themselves as lucky by virtue of their student enrolment and mindful of their relative professional vulnerability should they move to a less advantaged school. One teacher remarked:

They do what they need to do and we are proud of our NAPLAN results, but I don’t think — you know, you transport the same teachers and put them in a school out in [a disadvantaged area], you’re not getting the same results. It's as simple as that. It is because we don’t have to really do a great deal to do well at NAPLAN, that it's not such a serious point. (Teacher W1)

In brief, Woodlands was open to strong market mechanisms in light of community views that the school served as an important staging point for independent school selection processes reliant on individual NAPLAN scores (Tovey, 2013). In addition, the student body provided a homogeneous and stable teaching context open to standard and efficient responses to literacy and numeracy development. In other words, an ideal context for a technical-rational understanding (Lewis, 2015) of teacher professionalism and the application of managerial efforts to establish street-level control.

5.2 Edgefield State School

An overarching concern for the staff at Edgefield, where over half the students have language backgrounds other than English, were the consequences for students of a national testing regime that privileges native English speakers and Western norms of education (Creagh, 2013; Freeman, 2013). One school manager remarked:

I don’t personally feel that NAPLAN has serviced them at all. It's very much disadvantaging our kids because — …the teachers get very emotional and very upset when they watch their kids doing the NAPLAN testing, because they’re not able to demonstrate their understandings or their skills in the format that's presented. (Manager EC)

Teachers felt disempowered by an imposed assessment practice they viewed as inequitable; reflecting limited external understandings of what constitutes the measurement of meaningful achievement in disadvantaged student populations. Of particular concern, was how NAPLAN reporting constructed ‘good’ and ‘bad’ students without due consideration of learning barriers that had to be overcome.

Edgefield teachers appeared as protective of students’ learning identities as their Woodlands counterparts. However, whilst the latter were concerned with NAPLAN performance as a predictor of future success and access to private high schools, Edgefield teachers were concerned that NAPLAN was a meaningless assessment of their students’ capacities.

Like Woodlands, Edgefield teachers and managers saw their professional role as increasing NAPLAN performance. However, Edgefield staff saw this being achieved by developing meaningful and genuine teacher–student relationships that were at risk due to home circumstances, and some community values that did not adequately valorise learning. For example, one teacher reflected on how student absenteeism impacted on her professional responsibilities:

I find those things really distressing, as a teacher to think “How can I get this poor little one to come up [in their literacy performance]?” Especially if they’re a child that needed that extra support anyway, and to get them to come along with everyone. (Teacher E7)

Language barriers were also a commonly expressed limitation to professional practice:

We have a lot of ESL [English as a Second Language] children as well that clearly don’t know the language, so we have to give them some assessment. But we can’t afford to penalise them because they don’t know the language — but how do we know what they know, if we don’t know their language? So it's quite difficult. (Teacher E8)

In light of these perceived restrictions on the teachers’ professionalism, substantive improvements in NAPLAN performance were viewed as an unattainable goal.

Perhaps as a consequence of this view, collective NAPLAN preparation at Edgefield was not a priority and instead left to the discretion of the teachers. Nevertheless, the test was positioned as a significant and collective event for the students, including a school-organised breakfast on NAPLAN testing days, and a special school assembly where students who meet the national benchmarks were publicly rewarded. This ceremony posed professional challenges due to perceived disconnections between public and student experiences, and between public and organisational communication:

being a PR exercise, we ramp it up as well. We say “aren’t they fantastic”, and yet the message we get in the staff room from the Principal is quite the opposite. You know it's not disparaging, but it's certainly “the results are disastrous, they’re ugly, they’re horrible — we’ve got to do something. (Teacher E8)

Professional concerns were also expressed about how this public differentiation of “good” and “bad” students could impact on students’ commitment to learning.

It was good to showcase that, but I was standing there as a teacher calling out those people's names and I’m looking at those eight little people that were sitting on the floor that didn’t get any recognition, I have a major problem with that. So what are we doing to the kids if we’re doing all that to those eight little people? They’re never going to try, especially if you’re doing it to them in Grade 3. (Teacher E7)

In summary, the two schools shared professional goals around mediating NAPLAN pressures on students which was held in tension with the goal of enhancing individuals’ measured performance, and reflections on their own professional performance. However, these professional goals were configured very differently as a consequence of the very different student (and parent) cohort they taught.

6 Leadership, data, discretion and the professional

As Lipsky (1980) observed, PM can be a useful management tool to shape the discretionary conduct of street-level professionals (see also Prior & Barnes, 2011; Tummers & Bekkers, 2014). In schools, NAPLAN constitutes the performance of individual students, and when aggregated to the classroom is a proxy for teacher performance. This latter measure is highly contested given the well-understood relationship between (NAPLAN) student performance and parental social, economic and educational status. Arguably, much of the aggregate variations of NAPLAN performance are explained by socio-economic status (Carmichael, MacDonald, & McFarland-Piazza, 2014). How school principals and deputies used such performance data reflected both socio-economic contexts and leadership styles that were partly shaped by those contexts.

The distinction between the two principals’ approaches to NAPLAN and other educational performance data and its value for evaluation and developing teacher professionalism is notable. The Woodlands principal was a self-described ‘numbers person’ who ‘liberated’ the data to provide the framework for professional activity. The Edgefield principal felt the data was primarily for systemic purposes, and not useful in developing teacher professionalism or part of a management framework, preferring to keep it within the school management team.

6.1 Woodlands State School

Woodlands management took a coordinated and carefully orchestrated approach to improving quantified measures of school performance. Whilst this action closely aligned to the data usage strategies promoted by Education Queensland, the principal's personal motivation for uptake was aimed at strengthening teacher professionalism; the focus on enhancing teaching and learning overrode concerns with PM limitations. This principal described the necessity of first developing a shared understanding of the goals within a numbers-based performance framework, and a strategy for their realisation:

If you want to improve outcomes, you’ve got to have everybody on board and…you’ve got to have a framework to work within to ensure those teachers can perform. … what we try to do is take on board all those things and really, because it was just a very defined framework to work within, I took full advantage of that situation with staff…, “They’ve highlighted we need to do x, y, and z” and then have some form of agreement to say “Yeah, we really need to step up on that” because the focus is the children; it's not anything else but improving teaching and learning and it's student outcomes. (Manager WA)

This framework centred on the use of classroom assessment data as the basis for six-weekly manager–teacher discussions focused on activity to reach benchmarks and interventions for individual students. Accordingly, goal ambiguity was reduced through data usage and re-affirming the duty of care through professional development, albeit potentially with some goal displacement. Consequently, tensions associated with using NAPLAN to drive student literacy and numeracy improvements were deftly overcome; teachers were gathered under the umbrella of guided, professional control. The use of student assessment data was viewed as numbers-based teacher professionalism:

I think they’re things that… we should be doing anyway as professionals; using our data, analysing our practice, sharing our practice, building a community of learners. I see that as good practice. (Management WB)

Thus, assessment data for teacher performance management was internally driven and locally focused. Importantly, student performance data was not focused on NAPLAN outcomes. Rather, NAPLAN precipitated wider, more intensified numbers-based performance governance at both the system and local levels, yet still primarily focused on literacy and numeracy. For some teachers, this model of practice heralded a new local auditability:

I guess it's made teachers more accountable so that you’re striving to do better but…there's good and bad in that. Some teachers get stressed out by it; I like it. I’ve got to do better. Well not better; improve. I always want to find better ways to do it. (Teacher W4)

Although accountability loomed large, numerical governance was done to inform managerial oversight and professional development, rather than as heavy-handed, acritical, numbers-dictated management. Performance data was viewed as a collective, and not just an individual, performance improvement process.

It's sharing strategies. I guess moderation in a sense of seeing are we implementing things the same way, picking bits from people have observed — people who have had success with and letting others observe in that way. … feels to me like a sharing process of successes and also looking at areas for improvement. (Teacher W3)

Teachers therefore accepted and saw benefits in management oversight of their pedagogy and curriculum delivery. Data as a foundation for a professional dialogue was viewed as an opportunity for personal and collective professional growth. One teacher remarked on the personal motivations that stemmed from an open conversation on classroom data:

It definitely has made me, I think, a better teacher because — I know if they’re looking at my data, I want it to be good. I want to teach well… — when they’re checking up and you’re accountable, you’re striving to do the best you can all the time and always improve. So I guess in that way, it's good. (Teacher W4)

Despite increased pedagogical and curriculum steering, individual professional discretion was recast as collective and positioned within a numbers framework. While the boundaries of autonomy were reduced, teachers felt little compromise to their autonomy given the free and frank professional dialogue within data discussions. At the same time, they showed little awareness of how the numbers themselves had substantially reframed the space of professional autonomy.

6.2 Edgefield State School

The overriding perception of inadequacies of NAPLAN in measuring educational performance at Edgefield, led to minimal management direction of teacher conduct in relation to NAPLAN. In light of a challenging learning environment, management took a ‘hands-off’ approach by providing teachers with considerable autonomy and discretion to engage with NAPLAN preparation, curriculum and pedagogy.

So what we need is quality staff, who have got the capacity to manage themselves. It's not only about the pedagogy… When those children have very complex lives, you can become overwhelmed and feel “what can you do to solve the problem?” Well, the reality is that you can’t solve the problems but you need to help them to manage. (Management ED)

Thus, there are clear expectations that teachers at the school require substantial self-regulation and a capacity to venture into areas of practice beyond the traditional remit of teaching such as managing student absenteeism, conflict within families, and differing cultural expectations of educational goals. Management was guided by a belief that their school environment defied numbers driven educational practice arising from NAPLAN. This rationale underpinned the discretionary power granted to teachers as core professional tasks were instead directed at equipping students with social, emotional and cultural capacity. Interwoven within this narrative is recognition of the unmeasurable moral and ethical conundrums that flooded the professional decision making required within the school.

…in terms of the big picture thinking, we don’t go into minute detail, because that's not what is relevant for the classroom teacher. It's relevant for us because we are the ones that are at the strategic level trying to set the goals and help teachers set the goals. We can’t overwhelm people, and people are feeling very overwhelmed at the moment. (Manager ED)

However, this protective action by school management seemed to generate professional tensions for some of the teachers, with consequences for how they navigated conflicting goals arising from NAPLAN. The decision not to discuss educational performance data with teachers appeared to undermine some teachers’ trust in the school's capacity to improve performance and therefore the legitimacy of the school and its staff. One interviewee commented:

I don’t see the deputy or the principal up here watching people's classes, knowing what they’re doing, so I suppose they place a lot on the systemic data, because when we have meetings we get told we’re doing a really good job, but we’re still falling below the [NAPLAN] benchmarks. I don’t know what that statement means. I find that a really grey sort of thing to say, but I really don’t know how they’re going to evaluate stuff. (Teacher E7)

Here goal ambiguity was magnified for the teacher by virtue of the conflicting performance messages. Accordingly, there was a perception that insufficient attention was being given to collective professional dialogue in order to overcome goal conflict and develop a consensus on role expectations. One interviewee remarked that staff meetings did not capitalise on the opportunity for a free and frank forum:

[Other schools] have a staff meeting where they have professional dialogue rather than just a lecture and that's what we get. A lecture pretty much. (Teacher E9)

The absence of shared professional conversation about teaching and student performance as numerated through NAPLAN magnified a sense of professional isolation felt by some teachers and the professional concerns about improving measured performance compared to perhaps more basic educational goals.

The teachers questioned their individual capacity to develop strategies and approaches that might overcome the school's significant structural constraints in delivering improved NAPLAN performances demanded by the state. Teachers were left to self-manage in isolation and became overwhelmed with what they saw as their professional responsibility to educate students and improve their measured performance as demanded by the national NAPLAN narrative. One teacher commented on the general sense of responsibility felt staff:

…teachers dragging themselves to work because they just think, “I have to get this done. I have to do that.” I think that's an indictment where the pressure comes from, because you think you can never have a day off because then the kids will be a day behind, and that's where I’ve seen it change over the last five years too. (Teacher E7)

Another teacher was acutely aware of the school's relative local district performance.

I could see the results when we moderated some of their kids work. Their work was significantly superior to ours. “What else did you teach them in that time? You know, did you teach them letter writing? Did you teach them sentence structure? Did you teach them poetry? Did you teach them anything at all else?” I guess that given it's a national, and it's a standardised test, maybe I am disadvantaging my kids when I know that other teachers are doing it like that. (Teacher E9)

These comments reveal a moral self-questioning of their professional activities and the consequence for NAPLAN performance. The latter comment clearly demonstrates a personal burden in the ‘unmeasured’ discretionary action ultimately taken, implicitly connecting an individual working ideology to a hierarchy of organisational and political dynamics (Meyers & Vorsanger, 2003).

Accordingly, a degree of unease existed with a perceived lack of management oversight over their discretionary activity for two of the teachers interviewed with regard to: the underutilisation of data for teaching and learning purposes; the lack of peer evaluation; and an absence of collective and professional dialogue on how to address the performance challenges facing the school:

I think those things need to happen. And then you can test your data that way; did that work, and if it doesn’t work what are you going to do? There needs to be more follow-up, more substantive conversation about how you’re going to move children along, because really, apart from all this systemic testing, it's our job to move children, and you have to be able to show that movement. So even if they’re not going to achieve the things on NAPLAN, what are they going to achieve? So we need to be all working together as a team to do that. (Teacher E7)

It is clear from this quote, that there was a desire for collective management engagement with what educational performance data meant for professional responses to enhance measured performance from within a context that acknowledged that the measured performance was an unfair assessment of their professional conduct and of the students’ structural disadvantage.

7 Discussion and conclusion

This paper charted the dynamics of educational (specifically, literacy and numeracy) PM at the street-level and the effects on professional teacher practice. The divergent findings from two very different schools demonstrate that PM does not induce uniform dynamics within street-level organisations.

What was uniform was the widespread ambiguity and multiplicity of goals concomitant for the NAPLAN PM, reflective of the political macro-construction of NAPLAN's purpose. One key finding is that teachers largely did not preoccupy themselves with the wider goals of NAPLAN, instead focusing on professional goals constituted in relation to NAPLAN, such as preparing for the test, reducing performance anxiety and supporting students. Managing for NAPLAN became one of their professional duties of care.

Lewis’ (2015) distinction between the rational-scientific and the realistic-political model of PM, unexpectedly mapped closely to the two studied schools. Located in a socio-economically advantaged community, Woodlands State School appeared to operate closely to the rational-scientific model, whereby the principal engaged with teachers around diagnostic data conversations to formulate professional responses and evaluate outcomes. In contrast, the dynamics in Edgefield State School's socio-economically disadvantaged community and diverse student population, demonstrated many of the markings of the realistic-political model. Significantly, the PM was largely ignored and de-coupled from teaching practices. Teachers in the former school had a clear performance and accountability framework constituted by performance numbers, while the teachers in the latter had a non-numerical performance and accountability framework to support disadvantaged learners.

The socio-economic differences between the two schools and their associated engagement with PM strongly suggest that the rational-scientific model can only operate in certain conditions. Indeed, the ideal of performance management is predicted on ideal conditions. Staff at Woodlands were acutely aware of their student cohort characteristics; largely homogenous in English as a first language, non-disabled, non-indigenous, education and economically advantaged households with high attendance rates. Students began school ‘education-ready’, with engaged parents who valued and understood educational practices. Moreover, the high level of educational performance of this student cohort largely reflected their household circumstances, and not the professional conduct of the teachers. Thus, there was no performance stigma for the school and its teachers, although there were some demands on teachers to raise collective and individual student performance. These realities made it possible for the rational-scientific performance model of operate.

In contrast, the complex realities facing Edgefield students in fractured households and communities and migration backgrounds, meant that they and their teachers faced multiple hurdles in delivering educational performance. In short, many of the children were not ‘education ready’, and the teachers and the school saw this as their primary professional task. Accordingly, performance data was constructed by some management and teaching as largely disconnected to their professional roles, whilst others struggled with the performance challenge it posed. Having excised performance data as a framework for professional practice, teachers had a sense of floundering and being overwhelmed without a satisfactory way to imbed it into their professional role.

One interpretation for this disparity in performance management is to say it reflects different management styles within each school. There was evidence of this, but it would be highly misleading to interpret this as a reflection of different leadership styles or management ‘personalities’. Rather, these different management styles are intrinsically connected to the very different student cohort of each school. Contexts matter (Hupe & Buffat, 2014).

These dynamics have considerable implications for the conduct of street-level professionals and their exercise of professional autonomy and discretion (Prior & Barnes, 2011; Rowe, 2012). It has long been argued that professionals, such as teachers, are able to exercise professional judgement and discretion and their accountability is to the profession. Lipsky (1980) also observed discretion as an ever present reality of street-level bureaucracies, regardless of whether the actors are professionals or administrators, and that PM is an important management tool in directing those actors. Apart from PM technologies, there is also a long-standing argument that new information technologies are ‘reducing’ professional discretion (Braverman, 1974; Garson, 1989), whereas others argue that the technologies do not ‘reduce’, but ‘recast’ professional autonomy and discretion (Dearman, 2005). The findings reported in this paper also demonstrate that the impact of PM on professional autonomy is not a simple story of it being curtailed. Rather, it was observed that PM provided a new framework for evaluating and transforming professional practice. In making visible student performance and linking this to professional performance, performance data constituted professional conduct and performance in particular ways the import of which was not immediately obvious to the professionals, especially those in Woodlands State School. Rather, the numbers were viewed as a natural and objective measure for professional conduct, and provided a natural framework for exercising professional autonomy. While staff from Edgefield State School critiqued and eschewed the data as being irrelevant to assessing their professional conduct, they nevertheless found themselves either without an alternative frame for accounting for their professional conduct or challenged by its presence (Ball, 2003). These staff had autonomy devoid of clear professional guideposts in order direct their discretion. In short, PM is best articulated as a professional framework for exercising autonomy and accountability, which can be juxtaposed against alternative frames of autonomy and accountability, such as caring for the wellbeing of children, integrating into the workforce and/or society, or forming life-long learners. PM recasts and enumerates professional discretion subtlety by defining a prescribed (and arguably principal) frame of reference in which it can be enacted.

In summary, this paper demonstrates that the context of PM matters in understanding their dynamics within street-level organisations shaping professional conduct. Moreover, the widely held rational-scientific model of performance governance is not so much as wrong or misplaced, but predicated on specific, laboratory-like contexts whereby exogenous factors provide the perfect environment for performance and performance management to flourish. Indeed, it helps too if the performers come to that environment already performing well. As a consequence, if policy makers seek to use performance measurement to drive performance, they first need to build a performance-ripe environment.

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP110100803). The authors would like to thank the schools and staff of Education Queensland for their generous participation in this research.