Metrics, Standards and Alignment in Teacher Policy - Critiquing Fundamentalism and Imagining Pluralism

This book looks at the narrowing effects of contemporary modes of teacher and teaching policy and governance. It draws on political theory to provide new ways of conceptualising the effects of teacher and teaching policies and practices. It adds a new dimension to the robust body of literature related to teacher policy by looking at three interrelated domains: (1) teacher preparation and development, (2) teacher evaluation and (3) teacher leadership.

Drawing from case studies from the USA, UK and Australia, it illustrates how a coalescence around metrics, standards and compliance is producing increasingly restricted notions of teachers and teaching. It shows how the rationalities and techniques associated with accountability and standardisation are limiting the possibilities for multiple conceptualisations of teaching and teachers to exist or emerge. Using pluralism as the main framework, it challenges the dangers associated with rigid compliance and alignment and argues that pluralism can help secure schools as socially and culturally responsive to the needs of the community.

Dr. Jessica Holloway is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow within the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia). Her DECRA project, entitled 'The Role of Teacher Expertise, Authority and Professionalism in Education' investigates the role of education in modern democratic societies, with a particular focus on teachers and teacher expertise. Prior to earning her PhD in Educational Policy and Evaluation at Arizona State University in 2014, Jessica was a middle grades and high-school English teacher for six years in the USA. She has spent the past eight years studying and writing extensively about teacher accountability and evaluation in the USA and Australia. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Educational Policy, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Critical Studies in Education.