Evaluation and its politics: trade unions and education reform in Greece

ABSTRACT

The implementation of global teacher and school evaluation reform has often been contentious, in ways that differ according to national context. Teacher trade unions have frequently been active opponents of reform but their strategies and motivations have been relatively little studied. This article examines evaluation reform in Greece and the role of teacher trade unions in contesting it. It situates current collisions over policy in the context of Greek politico-administrative traditions, of past relations between unions and governments and of the austerity that followed post-2010 structural adjustment programmes. It places education policy change in the broader context of state reformation and contributes to understanding its inherent politics. Working with insights from Nicos Poulantzas, it identifies evaluation reform as a restructuring of the Greek state, where relationships between central authority and political actors such as unions have been reset, weakening the position of the latter. Drawing from interviews with union representatives, it analyses their reading of policy change and the dilemmas that faced them in responding to evaluation policies. In doing so, it points out the political role of teacher trade unions in both historical and contemporary terms while also highlighting the uncertainty of their response to evaluation reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade unions
• state forms and social conflicts
• structural reforms
• Greek education policy
• teacher and school evaluation

Introduction

For forty years raising teacher quality has been an important part of the global reform agenda in education, promoted by national governments and international organisations alike (Grek, Lawn, Lingard, & Varjo, 2009; Ozga, Dahler-Larsen, Segerholm, & Simola, 2011). It has been pursued by means of policy instruments that include results-based accountability, performance-related pay, stronger measures of school evaluation and inspection and formal mechanisms for evaluating the work of individual teachers (Clarke & Ozga, 2011; Grimaldi, 2019; Gunter, Grimaldi, Hall, & Serpieri, 2016; Cavalho, & Normand, 2018). Reforms to governance instruments ‘tend to generate increasing performative pressures and unrest among key education stakeholders (Verger, Fontdevila, & Parcerisa, 2019, p. 262) and “raising quality” has therefore been an area where conflict between policy actors has been a consistent feature (Braun, Maguire, & Ball, 2010; Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2013; Normand et al., 2018; Veloso, Abrantes, & Craveiro, 2013).

Though sharing a common globalised matrix, the reform agenda takes different forms in different national settings; it is “context-sensitive, contingent and path-dependent” (Verger, Fontdevila, & Parcerisa, 2019, p. 249; see also Kauko, Rinne, & Takala, 2018; Maroy & Voisin, 2017). In particular, drawing on the insights offered by historical institutionalist studies (Kickert, 2005) it has been argued that “the politico-administrative regimes to which countries adhere strategically mediate the variegated adoption and evolution of instruments” (Verger, Fontdevila, & Parcerisa, 2019, p. 249). A politico-administrative regime regulates relationships among social actors and the concern of this paper is with one such group of actors: teacher trade unions in Greece and their responses to quality-oriented reforms revolving around school and teacher evaluation. Since 2019 the New Democracy (broadly centre-right) government of Greece, drawing from the policy repertoire of international organisations, has legislated reforms intended to change the regulation, management and working practices of schools and teachers, with evaluation having a significant place in this package. The reforms reiterate the policy themes of a period which began with the crisis of 2008 and continued, at variable speed, through a period of austerity which included three programmes of structural adjustment (Radice 2014). In their post-2019 form, which owes something to the opportunities presented to policy-makers by the state of lockdown induced by the pandemic, the policies seek to terminate four decades of dispute about the status, work and influence of teachers and their unions (Stamelos & Bartzakli, 2013). They are thus both an instrument of educational reform and a means of changing a relationship between social actors within the state.

An historical institutionalist perspective alerts us to the significance of such changes. However, in at least some of its versions (Kickert, 2005) historical institutionalism tends to look at state institutions in relation to the extent to which they facilitate or impede modernisation programmes aimed at effectiveness and economic efficiency. Broader explanatory perspectives are not prominent and the relationship between state forms and social conflict is underexplored (Verger, 2021). This article therefore makes use of other traditions of research which enable us to set consideration of features of Greek politico-administrative regime within a broader social and political framework. The work of Nicos Poulantzas (1978a) is particularly useful in its emphasis on the state as a social relation reproduced through the continuous and conflictual interplay between institutional forms and the changing nature of social and political forces in its society. Understanding changes in the form of the state requires concrete social analysis of such interplay and the actors involved in it (Jessop, 1985). It is in this perspective that the article seeks to understand conflicts between government and trade unions over policies of evaluation in Greece, and their significance in Greek educational history.

To do so, it draws on data from seven interviews with leading representatives of the two Greek teacher trade unions in Greece, primary and secondary, who have had a significant involvement in policy development post-2008. In analysing the data, the article explores the reasoning behind unions’ opposition to evaluation policies in order to capture the perspectives of key actors at a time of decisive policy change. I ask: how do unions understand their role in the period of austerity and state reformation? How does this understanding relate to the evaluation reforms of the post-19 government? What are their strategic priorities in a period when established characteristics of the education state are subject to fundamental change?

The article aims to place questions of evaluation and trade union responses to it in overlapping contexts of theory, policy and historical enquiry. To this end, it makes use of literature from several fields: theoretical work on state formation, policy studies of educational reform in Greece since 1974, socio-political and economic accounts of the Greek financial crisis, and work in the field of industrial relations on union policies in a period of austerity.

Framing evaluation reform: state forms and social conflict

From a Poulantzian perspective (Poulantzas, 1978a, 1978b) the state can be seen as a strategic domain, a field where competing strategies for hegemony encounter each other (Jessop, 1985). The institutions of the state (e.g. the school, the church etc.), its relation to social actors, its strategic direction and its capacity to bring about change are all influenced by social conflict. A state’s historical and formal constitution is the result of such interplay – a “material condensation” of conflicts (Jessop, 2011, p. 43).

State forms are often unstable and as an effect of the political struggles that occur within it and around it, the state may have a “fractured, disunified” character (ibid.) which dominant parties and interests strive to make more coherent. From this perspective, new public management (Balazs & Faguer, 1996) or the “rise of the evaluative state” (Clarke & Dawson, 1999) are interventions in social and political conflicts that are both enabled and enabling. They are enabled by shifts in relationships of power between social classes; they are enabling in that they consolidate these developments “disorganising potentially adversarial social forces” (Hall, 1978, p. 62) and setting up new institutional forms which change relationships within the state. They thereby advantage managerial actors as against other interests.

Thus, a reading of Poulantzas adds considerably to understandings derived from historical-institutionalist study. For Kickert (2011: 805/Rhodes, 1997) the Greek state is a “Napoleonic” entity with an administration that is “centralised, hierarchical, uniform, accountable and controlled”. At the same time it is criss-crossed by “vested interests, political clientelism and patronage, political polarisation, administrative inefficiency, and general public distrust of the state” (ibid.). In this way, historical institutionalism sets the stage for an account of a modernising process based on new principles of coherence, effectiveness and operational flexibility. Drawing on Poulantzas, the process appears in a different light. Reform in the Greek education state required not only changes in its Napoleonic administrative tradition but also and perhaps more importantly, the marginalisation and disorganisation of opponents, including teachers and their unions. In education, evaluation reform is currently the policy area where the political conflicts integral to policy change are most evident.

Evaluation reform: Greece in the context of global policy

Evaluation reform is directed both at schools and at teachers (OECD, 2018). In a system of school autonomy and accountability, the operational autonomy of schools is increased at the same time as their effectiveness is measured in terms of targets established and monitored by the central state: evaluation of the performance of the autonomous school is integral to reform (ibid.). At the same time, evaluation is extended to the work of teachers. Literature advocating a global reform agenda suggests that “the most likely way to improve student performance is to improve the quality of teachers” (Hanushek, 2005, p. 14). Improvement in quality is the “result of deliberate policy choices, carefully implemented over time” (OECD, 2003, p. 7). It rests on “successful practices of recruitment, professional development and teacher evaluation” (OECD, 2018, p. 12). It also requires a rupture with established working practices. Since the rise in recent decades of a “managerial professionalism” (Maroy & Voisin, 2017, p. 16) teachers have been required to demonstrate classroom expertise against “goals and normative frames” that are set externally (ibid.). While they become active agents of classroom transformation, they are also required to be “malleable instruments of policy reform” (Normand et al., 2018, p. 8). Teacher malleability required new policy measures. For some researchers and policy advocates (Moe, 2015; Wiborg, 2017) teachers and teacher unions were obstacles to reform; not just for their espousal of particular policies, but because of what was seen as their intrinsic self-interest. Putting a “spotlight” on teacher performance and providing “rigorous evaluations” that would drive improvement, would be “threatening” to systems “in which performance was never seriously evaluated and all jobs were secure” (Moe, 2015, p. 279; see also Lucio, Koukiadaki, & Tavora, 2019; Vogiatzoglou, 2018).

Programmes of reform often involve historically significant changes in the form of the educational state and have thus become objects of political contention. This is particularly evident in countries of the European South, where the development of teachers’ professional autonomy linked to curriculum change and egalitarian objectives was central to the emergence of democratic, post-dictatorship settlements. These settlements combined features derived from a Napoleonic state, such as a teaching force appointed by the central state, assured of tenure and attributed with a nation-building mission (Kazamias, 2009) with others that recognised the importance of a balanced relationship between the state and teachers and their unions for democratic reform. It is on the basis of this experience, remembered by current social actors as part of a general movement of social emancipation, that evaluation reforms have been resisted (Veloso, Abrantes and Carveiro 2019; Stamelos, 1999; Stamelos, Vassilopoulos, & Bartzakli, 2012). Greece, which is one of the small number of EU countries without an embedded evaluation system (OECD, 2018) provides a particular case in this respect. Commitment to the “democratic school”, an idea that combined a claim to professional autonomy with a broader vision of an education system serving popular interests, was voiced in the initial period of 1981–85 of the socialist PASOK government.

In subsequent years, it has been neither implemented nor completely extinguished. Instead, there has been a long period of policy flux, in which elements connected to egalitarian and democratic aspirations as these have been conceived from the perspective of teachers and their unions, have been in tension with a drive towards reform justified in terms of modernisation (Traianou, 2019, 2021). The effect of such tensions has led successive OECD reviewers to conclude that Greek policy has experienced years of incoherent and weak implementation (OECD, 2011, 2018).

Teacher unions and evaluation in the Greek state

In many countries unions had an important influence on a twentieth-century pattern of educational reform, based on an ideal of equal opportunities and a degree of public confidence in the state (Derouet & Normand, 2011). Unions played a part in coalitions for change especially in the context of post-war (Allen, 1990) or post-dictatorship settlements. They had an expectation that they could both advance their members’ interests and increase levels of social provision (Cooper, Ehrensal, & Bromme, 2005; Fuller, Mitchell, & Hartmann, 2000).

In Greek public education there are two main teacher trade unions with a significant political presence: the Greek Primary Teachers’ Federation (DOE) established in 1921 and the Greek Federation of Secondary State School Teachers (OLME) founded in 1924. Each defines its mission in both trade union and broader terms. OLME’s constitution, for instance, states its purposes to be “securing teachers” working rights and promoting Greek culture’ (OLME, 1987). These twin commitments licence a prominent policy and professional role for the unions which, as much as organisation around pay and conditions, is a core element of their identity. Although both unions played a role in policy development before the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, it was in the 1980s that they became key social actors (Athanasiadis, 2011). They contributed to policy for teacher and school evaluation and strongly resisted quality-oriented reforms. In the period of 1981–85, the PASOK government abolished a school inspectorate associated with authoritarian governance and sought the support of unions in developing an alternative based on professional advice through school advisers. When government policy shortly mutated into a preference for more formal evaluation, union opposition helped ensure it was not implemented (Stamelos & Bartzakli, 2013).

Relationships between state and unions were more severely shaken in the course of the conflicts of the 1990s over pressures to establish mechanisms and instruments of quality assurance (Stamelos, Vassilopoulos, & Bartzakli, 2012), partly in response to an alleged failure of “schools as social institutions” (Zambeta 2002: 646). Unions pushed back against policy and discursive pressures, engaging to some extent with new discourses of evaluation (OLME, 1987; DOE, 1998; KE.ME.TE., 2001, Stamelos, Vassilopoulos, & Bartzakli, 2012). They gave at least formal support for a model of teacher development in which evaluation would have a supportive role based on professional dialogue without an impact on careers or salary advancement. Governments did not accept this position as the basis for an enduring settlement. Nevertheless, despite ongoing conflicts, teacher unions continued to play a significant role in the appointment of school advisers and more generally in the administration of the Greek education system (OECD, 2018).

The politics of evaluation reform: 2008–2019

After the crisis of 2008 unions in many countries faced new pressures on conditions of work and also on the ideological and institutional underpinnings that had sustained their sense of identity and purpose (Derouet & Normand, 2011). Cuts in education funding and policy changes combined with efforts to shift power away from unions, so that austerity or transformational reform might be achieved without significant opposition (Moe, 2015; Wiborg, 2017). For post-2008 governments in Greece, evaluation was a necessary part of a modernisation programme to lift the country out of a state of underperformance, expensive inefficiency and “the catastrophic loss of human capital” (Hatzis, 2015) which the established system of schooling had created (Diamantopoulou, 2011). The politics of school and teacher evaluation evolved in this context. Evaluation policies were an important element of PASOK’s 2010 Education Act, which was supported by a significant OECD report (OECD, 2011). The report depicted a “failing education” system with an “unsustainable cost-structure” which was “outdated”, “centralised” and “ineffective” (p. 3). It recommended that Greece should take the first steps towards a comprehensive policy for its underperforming workforce by evaluating teachers’ performance, with pay linked to the outcomes of evaluation. These recommendations were aligned with the structural reforms of 2010–2015 agreed by all Greek governments with external creditors. Collective bargaining agreements were set aside (Vogiatzoglou, 2018; Duman, 2021). Teachers’ salaries were reduced by one third, pensions were cut, professional development courses frozen and no permanent teacher appointments were made for several years. The established model of education, like other aspects of the “existing regime of social reproduction” was “deconstructed” (Ioakimoglou, 2018, p. 123) and elements of a new order introduced. Laws passed in 2013 set up a quality assurance authority and linked the measurement of teachers’ work to pay and promotion (Law 152/2013).

In the face of structural adjustment programmes, protecting teacher tenure became an important part of unions’ strategy of “resistance”; an active opposition and rejection of educational policy and reform (Carter, Stevenson, & Passy, 2010). Teachers and advisers participated in strikes in large numbers and boycotted new evaluation procedures (DOE, 1998); OLME, 1987) treating the crisis as an opportunity to argue for a more complete realisation of the post-1974 “democratic school” and its emphasis on teachers’ professional autonomy. At the same time however, alongside militancy existed a counter-tendency (Ioakimoglou, 2018) towards acceptance of a new agenda in which teachers, previously important actors at the level of the school as much as of the state, became less significant. Tsatsaroni, Sifakakis, and Sarakinioti (2015, p. 523) noted in this context, “a new ethos and emergent modes of control across the public sector” alongside a disposition among some education leaders to “depoliticise and despecialise educational issues”.

Relations between government and unions changed during the 2015–19 period of Syriza-led governments, which aimed to find a place for teachers and teacher unions in the discussion of policy (Traianou, 2021). They abolished legislation that threatened teacher tenure and froze the implementation of parts of the 2010 Education Act concerning evaluation and school autonomy. The pendulum swung towards an emphasis on developing teachers’ pedagogical capacity as part of a consensual “culture of evaluation” (OECD, 2018) that would combine themes of democratisation with measures to improve teacher quality, based on terms of soft accountability (Fox 2010).

Acceleration

The scene changed with the outcome of the 2019 general election. New Democracy won an outright majority, which it interpreted as a mandate for sweeping change. In education, this meant returning to the themes of the 2010 Education Act, reactivating school and teacher evaluation instruments and rejecting the approach of the 2015–19 Governments. “[Greek] society not only wants but demands evaluation”, said Education Minister Niki Kerameus, “and we have made this demand a reality” (alfavita 15.11.2021). ND’s manifesto had promised to “create a modern school of improved quality and effectiveness” (New Democracy, 2019), autonomous and strongly managed, in which teacher evaluation, linked to performance-related pay, would have an important part. Test results, like the outcome of whole school evaluation, would be published. As in other countries of the European South (Dobbins and Christ 2017) this amounted to a programme of change at several levels which offered management new powers over “personnel, financial and strategic matters” (ibid: 66). The reform was part of a broader policy agenda to establish the “executive state”, intended as a break from a Napoleonic tradition and from what its advocates termed “feudal divisions and the fragmentation of responsibilities” within the state (Konstandaras, 2022). At its core was a governance model, in which ministries responded to the directions of a central executive power equipped by digitalisation with the means to manage and steer public administration through NPM reforms towards “coherence and effectiveness”; these were qualities which the OECD thought were lacking in Greek government (OECD, 2020, p. 50). Thus, out of the conflicts of the 2008–2019 period and resuming the unfinished agenda set out by the OECD in 2011, emerged the outlines of a refashioned state embodying a different relationship between social actors and justified on the basis that it would serve to establish, in what was now one of the poorest societies in Europe, a knowledge economy (Eurostat, 2021).

New Democracy accelerated the pace of change. A complex Education Bill was brought to Parliament in May 2020 - in the most intense period of the pandemic – and pushed through the law-making process, becoming law the following month (Law 4690/2020). Embedded in its 245 articles were measures to establish the evaluation of schools and individual teachers, using a ranking system that ranged from “unsatisfactory” to “excellent”. The details were set out in further legislation which set a date of September 2021 for school evaluation to begin, with the evaluation of individual teachers planned for 2023/4. These legislative moves provoked a further Union mobilisation, restricted by the conditions imposed by the pandemic. The conflict continued throughout 2022 and 2023, although by June 2022 most schools had uploaded to the Ministry’s online platform some version of a response to government requirements, albeit, in some cases, in the form of a union-prepared template.

Methodology

This paper draws from a larger project funded by the British Academy, employing a historical case study methodology aimed at understanding the role of global and Greek national actors in structural adjustment (Traianou, 2021). Here, I rely on data from seven narrative interviews with trade union representatives who, post-2008, through successive phases of policy, held significant strategically-related posts in the two unions, OLME and DOE. Though relatively weakly resourced, with few full-time officials, Greek unions are strongly politicised. Their constitutions recognise the right of members to form political factions associated with organisations and movements of left and right; these are represented on the unions’ executive councils. Questions of strategy are thus matters of sharp debate within each union, though the unions have common agreed positions on the major questions of policy, evaluation included.

For the most part though, I have been able to refer to the position of “the unions” without needing to distinguish between them; and this has facilitated protecting the anonymity of informants. They are representatives of the main factions of the unions, from the centre-right to the left, and have served for at least some of the period as members of their executive councils. Three of the interviewees were from the primary [state] union DOE and four from OLME, representing secondary school teachers.

The interviews took place in 2019–2021, most of them face-to-face in Athens, while two were conducted online. Their length varied between forty and sixty minutes and they were conducted in Greek by the author, who also translated the extracts included in this paper. The process of identifying, contacting and securing the participation of informants from all the main factions of the unions was not straight-forward. It required the help of people who were peripheral to the policy process but whom I could nevertheless mention in my initial contacts with potential interviewees. They were not members of the teacher unions but had collaborated with them on several commissioned research projects and were respected by their executive councils. Consent for the interviews relied on building relationships of trust, which took some time. I found that I had to be accepted by overlapping policy networks, among whom there were disagreements as well as common ground.

The narrative content of the interviews was affected by their timing, spread out as they were across the 2019 pre and post-election period. The questions I asked revolved around the role of unions and how it had changed post-2010, as well as how these changes were reflected in unions’ strategies and affected their relationships with the state. I kept a reflexive record of my conduct during the research since this often involved the careful handling of confidential and sensitive information.¹ As this research was part of a larger project, I was aware that reliance upon one side’s accounts might skew the data collection and analysis. I therefore took care to check the main elements of what participants said against documentary sources. I worked from what are acknowledged to be key documents in the educational policy history of the 2010–22 period: trade union policies, Greek legislative material (e.g. the Education Acts 2010; 2018; 2020; 2021); OECD reports (2011; 2018), and the three Memoranda of Understanding 2010; 2012; 2015). I applied what has been called “conventional qualitative content analysis” (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) in order to identify key themes. In this, I made use of concepts derived from Poulantzas (1978b) concerning the relationship between state forms and social and political conflicts. I used the concepts to generate questions in the narrative interviews and to frame the data analysis; conversely, I used the data to interrogate the Poulantzian framework. I was particularly interested in understanding change over time in actors’ post-2010 thinking about the policy emphases and tactics of government, as well as about their unions’ shifting positions concerning school and teacher evaluation. I wanted to understand also, the unions’ own strategic thought and the terms of their response to reform. The analysis is organised in four sections following a broadly chronological order.

A state in crisis

From the data analysis a strong sense of the political and historical significance of evaluation emerges. Interviewees saw the decade since 2010 as a watershed moment in education policy and a period in which the pattern of the continuous and conflictual interplay between social forces, especially around pay and conditions was disrupted (Poulantzas, 1978b) by a severe austerity programme. Before 2010, in the words of one union representative, “syndicalism revolved around everyday matters” (Interviewee 1). Union pressure on government for higher salaries and increased funding was strong and conflicts were regular, but they were legitimised within a state which shared “a common emphasis on the importance of maintaining state education provision” (Interviewee 1). Unions and government were not divided on fundamental questions of policy direction:

In my view, 2009 was the last good year for education … the then government had a coherent programme which included a budget for school maintenance without outsourcing to private companies

(ibid.).

From 2010 the situation changed; the relations characteristic of the post-1974 state could not be sustained in a period of crisis. Crucial here was governments’ decision to work closely with the “Institutions” – the Troika of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF which managed structural adjustment – to reform the state, in the process disturbing relations between social actors. Thus, as one interviewee pointed out: the “last good year” was followed by one which saw significant change on financial, legal and policy-related areas, embodied in new legislation:

I think that the critical moment for teachers, for the ways in which we operate as a union and our position as citizens, was Diamantopoulou’s Education Act 2010/Law 3848 (Interviewee 3).²

In Greece as in other countries of the European South (Collet-Sabé, Garcia-Molsosa, Clarke, & Haines Lyon, 2022) accountability reforms had a political as well as a professional significance, changing the relationship between social actors within the state. In 2010 teachers’ right to tenure was challenged – as one interviewee emphasised making use of a resonant political reference point - “for the first time since the dictatorship” (Interviewee 2). Working conditions became more flexibilised and school leaders were awarded managerial powers. From the perspective of interviewees, since this moment of cuts and of the actual and symbolic weakening of teachers’ contractual position, “all governments, with the exception of a few individual ministers, can be described as crisis governments” (Interviewee 3). Evaluation became not only part of an ongoing dispute over the terms of modernisation, but also of a larger global/national structural adjustment agenda. This aimed at reducing the number of public servant employees (Featherstone, 2015) and laying the basis for a new public management regime whose promotion of school autonomy held the potential of privatisation (2018; OECD, 2011). As one interviewee described it: [since 2010] there had been a “disastrous continuity” (Interviewee 1) of policy. The 2010 and subsequent legislation signalled a policy direction in which evaluation would lose its developmental character and become part of a new agenda (Elstad, Lejonberg, & Christophersen, 2015):

[This type of] evaluation would have implications for pay and promotion and would not primarily be about the improvement of teachers’ pedagogical work. This was a procedural rather than educational evaluation for financial purposes which left open the possibility of redundancies if a teacher’s work was deemed inadequate twice.

(Interviewee 3).

For all these reasons, interviewees pointed out, “there is a negative connotation to the term” (Interviewee 7).

The 2015–19 interlude

Though interviewees’ understanding of the significance of evaluation was clear, their strategic thinking was more ambivalent. The issues which the unions tried to address in the 2015–2019 period did not concern wages so much as the terms on which the educational state was being reorganised. The formation of SYRIZA-led governments in one sense paused educational reform, including school and teacher evaluation, without dismantling post 2010 quality assurance institutions. The governments tried to restore some of the characteristics of an earlier state formation, mitigating some of the effects of post-2010 policy choices. In the words of one interviewee belonging to a faction otherwise critical of SYRIZA, the government’s cancelling of Law 152 on evaluation was the “salvation of teachers” (Interviewee 1). In another sense the momentum of the previous few years continued, in the form of austerity and evaluation reforms which would change relationships between state and policy actors, both national and international (Traianou, 2021). To these changes, the unions responded critically but without great force: “strikes and mobilisations” were not a strong part of the unions’ response (Interviewee 4). Nevertheless, they did not go so far as to adopt a strategy of “rapprochement” (Carter, Stevenson, & Passy, 2010) towards the left-led governments They suspected that government negotiations with the creditors and the OECD would consolidate earlier attempts to disorganise trade unionism by opening the door too far to a wider programme of reform “while doing little to mitigate austerity” (Interviewee 6). Unlike their counterparts in other countries which used rapprochement strategies in an attempt to maximise gains for their members within a new educational agenda (Carter, Stevenson, & Passy, 2010), the unions refused to meet with the OECD. The OECD policy team in its turn drew out the implications of this position: the current state of relations [between teacher trade unions and government] represented an obstacle to further development of Greek education’ (OECD, 2018, p. 64).

The unions’ ambivalent position in relation to their place in the state became a matter of later reflection. Looking back on the 2015–19 government policy on evaluation some interviewees identified missed chances to assert and gain support for a different model of professional accountability argued in terms compatible with democratic education. They suggested that it might have been possible to position themselves as an important actor in their conflicts with the govenrment by embracing the reform agenda more openly, implementing an acceptable kind of school evaluation. Indeed some interviewees took the idea of a “culture of evaluation” to mean that the government’s concept was essentially an endorsement of the unions’ positions. Others thought that there was some distance between positions, but even so:

maybe we should have embraced more openly SYRIZA’s framework of evaluation … it was closer to our positions … If Kerameus had brought to us that framework [the SYRIZA-led government one] we would largely have accepted it

(Interviewee 2).

From this perspective, the OECD was recognised with some uncertainty as a necessary policy actor (Traianou, 2021) and accountability reform as a consolidating force (Poulantzas, 1978a). Searching for new discourses (Maroy & Voisin, 2017) to counter state reformation, some union leaders thought that discussion with the OECD reviewers even though they were representatives of “neoliberalism” (Interviewee 5) should not have been ruled out; they would have had much to learn from engaging with the organisation:

We should have met with the OECD … I think we would have got something out of the meeting and we could have shown our opposition by organizing a protest outside the Union’s headquarters.

(Interviewee 1).

Others were much more sceptical about the idea of missed opportunities. They were expecting from their union a more general opposition to 2010 education reform and an opportunity to realise historically-grounded egalitarian ideals (Jones et al., 2008). From this perspective, the mobilisations of the period 2010–15 held the potential for the “radical transformation of the education system” (Interviewee 6) a potential dissipated by the experience of the 2015–19 period: “there was hope before 2015 … I’m not sure what there is now” (Interviewee 2). In this view, SYRIZA’s moderate version of evaluation had paved the way for New Democracy’s more severe programme by helping to create an “induced passivity” (Interviewee 7) among teachers that prepared them for a new system:

Syriza produced the concept of the ‘good evaluation’. Their framework includes four clear parameters which the school will have to respond to. One of them makes references to the effectiveness of the school unit and pupils results. Another one is about finding support or making links with the local community, which means look for sponsors … The report will be qualitative … there are no quantitative indicators but this does not make it distinct from previous programmes. I often ask my union colleagues, have you realized what you have done? You left the tracks for the train to run. New Democracy will arrive and it will just press the button … . they are holding back now … but nothing will stop them after the elections’

(Interviewee 6).

In this line of thinking, conditions could only be defended by a strategy of resistance (Carter, Stevenson, & Passy, 2010) based on action and a refusal to accept any part of a “good evaluation framework” since it was not distinct from previous programmes (Interviewee 7).

Post 2019: towards state reformation

As the literature suggests, it is not uncommon for governments during structural reform to shift power away from unions (Moe, 2015; Wiborg, 2017). The political conflicts that occurred within and around the state since 2010 destabilised the position of the unions in relation to their historical priorities, especially around pay. Pay cuts enforced by successive structural adjustment programmes were faits accomplis which the unions had found it unproductive to fight: “there was no point demanding a pay increase when it felt like that the whole public sector had ‘accepted’ this change to their living standards” (Interviewee 1). The reformation of the state had raised, according to this interviewee, issues that were “more fundamental”. They were about ‘resisting privatisation’ they were about “the kind of education we want in Greece” (ibid.). In their narratives several interviewees recognised the significance of the policy turn and its implications for their role:

Our priority now is to maintain the public character of education … Our work has turned into a shield aimed at saving whatever it can … The Union’s agenda has switched to defensive action.

(Interviewee 1)

In terms of strategy there was a shift away from pay towards protecting teachers’ long standing rights to professional development and to the improvement of working conditions – conditions which were associated with a conception of the teacher’s role very different to that envisaged by government:

We focused on claiming back professional development rights … there had been ‘no proper continuing professional development for ten years … the right to research … the school structure … the hiring of teachers … other requests revolve around school building maintenance… the health and safety of teachers …

(Interviewee 2).

This long-term defensive strategy, however, was sidelined by the imperative to respond to post-19 reforms. Interviewees saw New Democracy’s programme as a more forceful resumption of earlier attempts to reform the state and the social relations within it. The policy themes, implemented by advisers “who worked alongside ministers in 2010–14” (Interviewee 5), were such that the policy of the earlier period was returning “as our worst nightmare” (Interviewee 1). In the unions’ perspective, the Education Acts of 2020 and 2021 worsened the long-term problems of the system, while failing to respond to the effects of austerity and the new urgencies of the pandemic: “Greece must be the only country where the budget for education was reduced even further during the pandemic” (Interviewee 4). At the same time the new prominence of the state’s evaluative functions (Clarke & Dawson, 1999) created new and less balanced relations between teachers and government. Interviewees took the view that it “demanded of teachers that they take responsibility for managing the situation” instead of “fulfilling its own obligations and remedying the injustice inflicted on schools and teachers by policies of austerity” (Interviewee 2).

Against the reformation of the state, the narratives of interviewees returned to historical positions. Evaluation should stem from educational rather than managerial concerns: they were not “against evaluation” (Interviewee 3) but insisted it should have a pedagogical purpose:

Since 1997 we [both unions] have been arguing that evaluation should be a process internal to the school. Not conducted by externals who don’t know the school and children’s needs … It is the specific form of evaluation of the present government to which the unions object … a bureaucratic exercise removed from pedagogy and with a punitive character

(Interviewee 5).

The unions had hoped to engage with New Democracy. Instead, they faced a government which they perceived as determined to minimise resistance (ibid.), a government the like of which “they had never experienced before” (Interviewee 4). The emergent “executive state” had taken decisive political action, with the Minister “choosing a tough strategy” (Interviewee 5) for the rapid implementation of a radical programme of reform. For several interviewees the government aimed at “disorganising” (Hall, 1978) and effectively derecognising the unions, preventing them from being significant social forces:

They want to eradicate the unions. When the Government speaks about mobilisations they never mention the Unions as organisations with a discrete identity … they prefer to say ‘some syndicalists said or did this, that or the other’ … the government narrative and that of much of the media is we don’t want to improve teaching … we don’t care about education … we do not want to improve quality

(Interviewee 5).

The pandemic assisted such a strategy. Just as the 2010 crisis had been “instrumentalised” by the centre-left PASOK government (Interviewee 5) to accelerate education reform, the conditions of passivity imposed by the pandemic had from the interviewees’ perspective been utilised to “shut down the possibilities for mobilisation” (Interviewee 4) and remove obstacles to reform. There were “meagre levels of consultation” (Interviewee 5) not only about the impending 2020 and 2021 Education Acts but more generally:

We invited several times the Ministry to engage in a dialogue with the Unions but … the pandemic and the lockdown were used as excuses, putting barriers on the kind of meetings and the number of representatives present at the meetings … . … Amendments to an education act would pass through parliament at 12 pm on a Friday evening … one after the other … There was no time for us to breathe …

(Interviewee 4).

Dilemmas of strategy

The Unions’ response to these challenges was a complex one, ambivalent at times, in which assertions about continuing militancy were combined with a search for what Bascia and Stevenson (2017) call “renewal”, new and possibly ambiguous ways of working that might complement resistance or might alternatively suggest a move away from such a perspective.

Across both unions and all factions, interviewees stressed how government policy post-2010 had “radicalised teachers” (Interviewee 2) and increased levels of membership:

teacher participation in the mobilization against evaluation reached 90 per cent … even teachers who have never been on demonstration participated in the recent mobilization [October 2021].

(Interviewee 6)

Like their peers in other European states (Bascia & Stevenson, 2017) some hoped this level of participation could be sustained by an expanded culture of syndicalism, counteracting pressures from government:

For us it is very important to keep our members together … would you call this is syndicalism? … yes for us it is because it is important not to lose members … so we organized summer camps for the children of our members … it is crucial to keep our members together and to have their participation …

(Interviewee 1).

They claimed to see a “maturing” (Interviewee 3) of teacher trade unionism and its emergence as an autonomous force, no longer confined within the kind of close alliances with political parties that had been a feature of a factionalised trade union movement in the pre-crisis decades. This newly established distance would offer them opportunities for renewal, allowing them to become more “independent” (Interviewee 3) and abandon what some saw as the intellectual and political “inflexibility” of traditional unionism (ibid.). From this perspective, the focus was on engagement with other kinds of activity, especially research, with a greater capacity for developing new “discourses” to counter government policy (Maroy & Voisin, 2017). On the basis that “unions must once again be able to make a credible intervention in policy” (Interviewee 3), they aimed to “fill the gaps in government policy” (Interviewee 5) through the work of the two unions’ research centres and other research activities. Several interviewees referred to the research projects the unions carried out during the pandemic – for example on the effects of online teaching on education inequalities – and claimed that such studies have the potential to inform government policy. In these activities, the interviewees seemed to hope for a significant role in the recently reformed educational state, without abandoning their historical positions:

to let people know about what is going on in terms of evaluation and privatisation not only in Greece but also globally … to “win” the argument by drawing on research evidence

(Interviewee 6).

Other interviewees were less hopeful. Political shifts and new alliances within the unions had not created an autonomous force so much as an area of consensus, amenable to at least partial acceptance of the new situation:

… during 2015–19 at the level of mobilisations the two factions close to SYRIZA and ND shared the view that people were tired and the appetite for struggle is less … this was a problem … in the end we accepted the ‘good evaluation’, the Gavroglu framework (Interviewee 7).³

From this critical perspective emerged disagreement over strategy. In the name of continued resistance some interviewees questioned the unions’ strategy of asking their members to oppose new evaluation procedures by uploading a union-composed template response to government requirements on evaluation. For the critics, this was a concession to government and an accommodation with the new educational state: in reality, they argued, “there are no ‘innocent forms’; the government can now claim that most schools have engaged with evaluation” (Interviewee 6).

Conclusion

The article has combined a theoretically-informed account of changes in the form of the Greek education state with an exploration of trade union responses to them. As Poulantzas (1978b) has emphasised, the institutions of the state, its relation to social actors, its strategic direction and its capacity to bring about change are all influenced by social conflict. Greece post-2008 has experienced intensive periods of such conflict whose outcome, provisionally at least, has been the success of forces which see market-orientated state reformation as a necessary means of transition to a knowledge society. It is these forces which are now driving a reformation of the state.

Since 2010, the interplay between institutional forms and social and political forces increasingly influenced by crises (financial, socio-medical) and austerity, has shaped the politics of teacher and school evaluation and influenced new forms of governance around it. This article has shown this process at work in several ways: the drying up of opportunities for professional development; the application of instruments for school and teacher evaluation; the speed of the law-making process; the invention of new forms of governance, notably the “executive state”; the marginalisation of unions in the policy-making process. Policy instruments, relationships between educational actors and the state itself have been simultaneously changed. Even so, evaluation remains a contested project which is not yet embedded in schools. The non-completion of reform indicates the “persistence” of the national (Grek, 2019) of historical characteristics of the Greek state in relation to education, even after more than a decade in which the necessity of change and the “obstacle” that teacher unions “self-interest” (Moe, 2015) represent have been central themes of both external Institutions and national governments (OECD, 2018).

The reform of school and teacher evaluation in Greece is both a process of educational change and an episode of political conflict with historical implications. It is in this context that the article has explored the ideas, dilemmas, and strategies of the two state teacher unions, as they seek to find a place for trade unionism in the new education state. Analysis of the data suggests awareness on the part of trade unionists of the scale and significance of change. They work in the knowledge that the “bread and butter” issues with which trade unionism has customarily dealt form only a part of the agenda that they require. In addressing this agenda, they draw from historical experience, positioning themselves as significant actors, guardians of a national tradition, framed around the idea of the “democratic school”. At the same time they realise the limitation of these resources. Their experience of setback has drawn them into a process of self-questioning and debate which is ongoing and uncertain, with the relative importance of mobilisation, engagement with government and union renewal among the issues at stake. This uncertainty revolves around two related questions: the first is about the kind of public education and evaluation that is possible post- 2010. The second question relates to the position that is available to the teacher unions in the post-2019 state – a position of a sort that would enable them to defend public education at the same time as it allowed a return to struggles over pay and conditions (McCollow 2017).

We have seen how the unions hope that through an increased emphasis on policy work, they can address this uncertainty, attracting government’s interest in working with them. However, added to these externally-derived problems are uncertainties of internal, factional nature. While some interviewees reflect hopefully on the possibilities for inserting the unions in the reconfiguration of the state, others emphasise the risks of engaging with policies which aim to dissolve what they see as a necessary cause, grounded in popular experience. In this, Greek debates resemble those in other European countries (Carter, Stevenson, & Passy, 2010) where similar tensions between adaptation and opposition play themselves out. Following Poulantzas (Jessop, 1985), we can say that the state structures offer unequal chances to different forces within and outside the state to act for different political purposes. For the Greek unions, the inequality of such chances has increased, while the government’s capacity for decision-making has also grown. It could be argued that the tensions that derive from such an imbalance will not be resolved without effective strategies to weaken the post-crisis state form and enable teacher trade unions to re-establish a position as important political actors in Greek education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants, [SRG1819\191004].

Notes on contributors

Anna Traianou

Anna Traianou is Professor of Education, in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her work is situated in the fields of ethics and of politics. She has published extensively on questions of social research ethics and has researched European education policy. Drawing on a range of theoretical work critical political economy, historical sociology and theories of the state she has recently studied the role of international interventions in Greek education policy post-2010.

Notes

1. Ethical approved was obtained by Goldsmiths, University of London REISC, no: 1497.

2. Anna Diamantopoulou, Minister of Education, PASOK, 2009–2012.

3. Kostas Gavroglu, Minister of Education, Syriza, 2015–2019.