The ‘doublethink’ of data: educational performativity and the field of schooling practices

Abstract

This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educational performativity and data, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article reveals how performative, data-driven practices play out at the level of the school. This process reveals a ‘field of schooling practices’ characterised by contradictory and contested logics of deifying, delivering and denying data. We describe this as the ‘doublethink of data’, involving teachers engaging with performative processes for purposes of compliance but without any real sense of the value of doing so. The research reveals the extraordinary energy involved in this work, and cautions against these performative practices and associated technologies.

Keywords:

• Data
• performativity
• Bourdieu
• logics of practice
• field

Notes

1. All school and teacher names are pseudonyms.

2. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority is responsible for publishing the NAPLAN results of all 9500 Australian schools on the MySchool website (http://www.myschool.edu.au). The site allows comparisons to be made between schools based on their NAPLAN performance.

3. Other forms of data included curriculum-based assessment in each of the major subjects (‘Key Learning Areas’) of English, mathematics, science, history, geography, arts, technologies, and health and physical education. This included both formative data (including diagnostic data collected during ‘trial’ tests/performances within subjects) and summative data (collected during or at the conclusion of specified units of work in each of the Key Learning Areas). ‘Reading level’ data were also an important focus of attention (see note 4, later).

4. Reading levels refer to a standardised measure of students’ reading capacity, identified through a series of reading books developed for this purpose.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented was supported by the Australian Research Council [Grant No. DE120100086].