Datafying the teaching ‘profession’: remaking the professional teacher in the image of data

Abstract

This paper explores how data-driven practices and logics have come to reshape the possibilities by which the teaching profession, and teaching professionals, can be known and valued. Informed by the literature and theorising around educational performativity, the constitutive power of numbers, and affective responses to data, it shows how different US educators experienced, and came to embody, new forms of numbers-based accountability. Drawing on interviews with teachers, and school- and district-level leaders, as well as relevant school-based documents, it is argued that such data are now both effective (i.e. they change ‘what counts’ within the profession) and affective (i.e. they produce new expectations for teachers to profess data-responsive dispositions over actual educative practices). This prevalence and use of data have combined not only to change teaching into a ‘data profession’, but also to change teachers into ‘professors’ of data.

Keywords:

• Data
• subjectivity
• affect
• teacher disposition
• standardised assessment

Notes

1. It should be noted that we are using the term ‘value-added model’ (VAM) broadly to include all such statistical tools that are used to measure teacher effects on student test scores. While other models, such as student growth measure models, are technically different in terms of their statistical procedures and properties, they operate similarly in their purpose of quantifying teachers’ influence upon student test score growth. For the purposes of this paper, we are concerned with the latter and thus will be using ‘VAM’ to capture all such models.