Chile´s Evaluation and Incentives for Teacher Development Policy :

Fashioning teachers´ identity to new public management

Researchers: Vicente Sisto, Carmen Montecinos y Luis Ahumada

(Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso )

contact: Vicente Sisto (vicente.sisto@ucv.cl)

Supported by FONDECYT (National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development , Chile. Project Nº 1090739)

vicente.sisto@ucv.cl

New Public Management and Education New Public Management (NPM) as Fashion:

Public sector organizations will be more efficient if they mimic the operational modes of private companies in a context comparable to a competitive market

NPM in education can be observed in: the implementation of accountability policies, the development of a range of efficiency measures by

which individuals, units, and organizations are judged, marketization among service providers, and changes in relationships with beneficiaries now

transformed into customers

Stephen Ball (1998) calls a ‘new orthodoxy’: a new discursive framework for educational policy that promises to improve the quality and competitiveness of national education, by increasing control over educational institutions on the one hand and submitting these institutions to increased competitiveness on the other (Ball in Wittman, 2008: 33-34).

Teachers have been a fundamental target of these policies.

Main features of this policy: Evaluation according to standards, Performance-based compensation models, and Installation of professional venture prototypes

Evaluation and Incentives Policies for Teacher Performance has been a strategy to change teachers by a set of performance standards , accountability systems, and monetary incentives that promote a model of professional development. Prescribes what is meant by teaching, promoting

professional categories and specific assessment criteria to which teachers should circumscribe their performance.

Establishing criteria of demarcation not only about what will be included as an adequate performance, but also about who is included and who will be excluded from the category of a good teacher

These policies appeal directly to the identities of teachers

Evaluation and Incentives Policies for Teacher Performance in Chile as NPM

The Implementation of Policy Evaluation and Teaching Performance Incentive From 2000, reform efforts have moved toward

various accountability and quality assurance frameworks which were directed more clearly towards performance: a mandatory teacher evaluation system for teachers working in the municipal sector.

The system consists of three stages. 1. All teachers must be evaluated via a portfolio, a

video of a teaching session, interview with a peer and an evaluation from the building administrator.

2. Those obtaining good results, can voluntarily apply for the next stage which entails access to economic incentives.

3. Those who perform well on this second evaluation may become a Teacher of Teachers. These master teachers can become a teacher leader and a professional developer to work with peers (workshops, tutoring, counselling).

vicente.sisto@ucv.cl

A new way of being

The Master teachers become the icon of teacher professional development: an entrepreneur who can be hired by low performing

schools, the Ministry or other agencies working in low performing schools. The master of teacher is expected to seek out potential customers and is able to have a customer pool by being placed in a roster of “certified” consultants.

Accountability rests on an ideology that understands performance as reflecting merit, and individual responsibility.

This professional development approach is expected to encourage the development of new teaching practices and new professional identities based on: technical competence, autonomy, individual accountability for results ,and self-management of their own professional development

The idea of worker as an entrepreneur, author and responsible for its own trajectory is the new model of professionalism for the teacher workforce.

vicente.sisto@ucv.cl

NPM as a New Grammar

vicente.sisto@ucv.cl

These types of devices try to generate a change in the teaching workforce based in management practices over human resources originating in the private sector, concerned with organization control and production (Gunter and Rayner, 2007). Based on the assumption that the work of teachers

may be described by single variables and best practices condensed in a manual.

The emphasis is placed on an overriding need which is presented as inclusive: we must change to create a better future. But, there are some who need to change (teachers) and others who know what they have to change (the experts).

Teachers of Teachers emerge as an icon of this figure that must guide those who are not in-tune with the new melody building this new teacher professionalism.

New performance regimes operating towards outside: acting on standards and outcomes inside :"colonizing lives and producing new

subjectivities, generating identities disciplined under targets, indicators, measures and records of performance (Ranson, 2008 , p. 207).

But…

A significant number (49%) of teachers eligible for the second stage of the assessment system applies, even when just sitting for the test awards them an economic incentive (MINEDUC, 2007).

Some studies have shown the contradictions between the identities promoted by this policy and historically constructed identities (Bellei, 2001; Núñez, 2004; Sisto et al. 2009): Teachers report that the impact of education (and

thus of their work) can only be measured in a long term basis and are influenced by a number of institutional and social factors that are beyond individual performance .

The allocation of individual rewards is perceived as harmful for coexistence, because imposes competition among members of the educational community.

In the opinion of teachers, such system fails to recognize the nature of teachers’ work, which is cemented in a profound ethical and social commitment.

vicente.sisto@ucv.cl

The identities and forms of action prescribed at a central level are negotiated on the periphery, and these negotiations are giving concrete ways to public policy that validate, subvert, and ultimately, make it more or less effective. Our intention is to reveal a history

that can be accounted through actions and events that may seem anecdotal to a perception based on dogma.

The purpose is mainly to be connected to relevant debates on how we are building in the context of new forms of government in liberal societies.

Following Gunter, I refuse to accept contemporary assumptions with which today education is being built, because “we are in danger of losing our collective memory” (Gunter, 2008: 254)

Chile´s Evaluation and Incentives for Teacher Development Policy :

Fashioning teachers´ identity to new public management

contact:

Vicente Sisto vicente.sisto@ucv.clPontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

Research Supported by FONDECYT (National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development ,

Chile. Project Nº 1090739)