Teacher accountability and education restructuring: an exploration of teachers’ work identities in an urban school for poor in India

ABSTRACT

Teachers’ work in India is impacted by the ongoing restructuring of school education that incorporates simultaneous attempts at reform and regulation. Child-friendly assessment policy instituted by the local bureaucracy leads to intensification of teachers’ administrative roles, drawing their attention away from critical pedagogic ones. Limitations in policy interpretation are found to be in response to the official discourse of efficiency that manifests in performative measures of accountability inconsistent with the intended reforms. In this ethnographic case study in an urban middle school for poor, teachers’ attempts to comply with instruments of accountability while adapting to changing pedagogic relations with their students and achieve coherence in their identities are examined. The paper draws attention to the contrasts between models of good teaching held by teachers, vis-à-vis the official discourse. It argues for a reworking of the existing model of accountability towards incorporating a cultural-political conception of pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers’ work
• teacher identities
• accountability
• new Public Management
• urban schools for poor
• India

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on my doctoral thesis submitted to the School of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. I am grateful to my supervisor, Prof. Disha Nawani for her guidance and support of my PhD. I thank Prof. Padma Sarangapani for help with arguments in the paper on pedagogic reform and bureaucratic education management. I thank Dr. Rahul Mukhopadhyay for his valuable inputs in revising the paper. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This includes government, government-aided and private schools.

2. General category is an administrative category denoting forward castes that constitute about one fifths of the total population.

3. Government schools constitute roughly 75% of total schools and 51% of student enrolment in India at the elementary level (GoI. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2014).

4. Aided schools are privately managed government schools that represent an older form of private, philanthropic participation in education distinct from newer forms of for profit private partnership (Tilak Jandhyala, 2016). Teacher salaries in aided schools are paid directly by the state government while the private body manages the school through its philanthropic contributions. These schools are subject the same rules and regulations as government schools but in certain cases, they may be exempted from specific requirements.

5. No change was requested or made in school schedule on account of the research. The objective was to observe activities throughout one full academic cycle.

6. Bengaluru’s decadal growth rate of population was the highest of all Indian cities, going from 5.1million in 2001 to 8.4million in 2011.

7. https://censusindia.gov.in/

8. Pseudonyms are used throughout the paper.

9. HM was the senor most teacher in SCMS and designated as the head mistress by the private management to create a reporting structure. She did not have a similar designation under the state department. Other teachers did however defer to her as a senior member and she had a slightly less teaching load.

10. FA is mid semester formative assessment; SA is end semester summative assessment.

11. Refers to a popular Indian film about a liberal arts teacher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meera Chandran

Meera Chandran is faculty at Centre for Education Innovation and Action Research (CEIAR), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), India. Her research interests lie in the sociology and political economy of education. She teaches in the Masters in Education programmes at TISS and is the Research Lead of Connected Learning Initiative.