Performativity and Administrators/Managers in the Ministry of Education

I imagine that the Ministry of Education has periodic reviews where, as a team, it assesses its achievements over the period under review and charts the way forward for the next period.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario:

The permanent secretary convenes a meeting with Heads of Departments. The Minister may also be invited to the meeting. If the Minister is a part of the meeting, protocol demands that he gets the first chance to put something substantive on the table. The permanent secretary being the manager of the entire ministry is the chairperson of this meeting. She gets through the preliminaries and invites the Minister to make a few comments. The Minister thanks them for having him there then launches into outlining some of the issues that’s been on his mind. He reminds the attendees at this meeting about the dire economic strait that the country is in, a state that is being exacerbated by the global economic crisis. He draws their attention to the need to reduce costs in the Ministry per the dictates of the Ministry of Finance (MoF). He tells them not to feel “picked on” because the MoF expects the same economy from all ministries. He tells them that in spite of the constraints that they face – low salaries, un-ideal working conditions – they must be commended for the effort that they have put in to date to keep the education system going. However, he says, there are still areas of their work that they must try to improve. He pauses, thinks about what he is going to say next, then with resolve tells them that they still need to work to improve their responsiveness to the public who continue to complain about poor service in spite of the efforts that the Ministry had put in place to address this very issue. He concludes his presentation by urging them to go back to their departments and continue the good work they are doing, but to aim at improving the way they deal with the public.

 The permanent secretary concurs with the Minister’s statements saying that they, indeed, need to improve their systems and procedures that they use to interact with their stakeholders. She then calls on each head of department to give an account of he/his stewardship. Each head starts his/her presentation by thanking the Minister for his comments but note that they are not always to blame when their stakeholders complain about the service that they provide. The public, they say, can be quite mean and sometimes it literally requires the patience of Job to deal with them. Furthermore, they are doing the best they can, and they understand that resources are limited, but it is just too difficult to function without adequate resources. They are putting that on the table with the hope that the Minister will use his influence to source more resources for them, they say.

 

And, like the story of the deployment of the talents in the Bible, each recipient of “talents” presents the returns on their “investments”. Some claim to achieve much, some not so much.

 The minister and permanent secretary, in turn, comment on the presentations, serving out commendations where these are due and encouraging those whose efforts had not borne much fruit to seek out “new” ways of operating. The permanent secretary then presents the way forward. She reminds them of the principles under which government is operating: issues of governance are important, now, she tells them, so we have to work on that; we, all of us, must strive to be effective and efficient; we have to reduce costs; accountability is important. You know from time to time the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) calls us to Parliament to give an account of our stewardship. We have not been doing well in this regard, she tells them, so the next time they call us we want to be prepared. So, let us do our best; and remember, she tells them, we need to improve our service to the public. When members of the public complain about the service that we provide to them they give the Ministry a bad name. That is not good.

 They set a date for the next meeting then the permanent secretary wraps up the meeting. After socialising for a while, they return to their departments to do what they have always done.

When we examine the issue of performance in the education system, we tend to focus on schools. What percent of students enter primary school with the requisite skills to master the Grade one curriculum? What percent of students pass the Grade Four Literacy Test (GFLT)? What percent of students perform satisfactorily in the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) to be awarded a place in the school of their choice? What percent of students pass the Grade Nine Achievement Test (GNAT)? What percent of students leave schools with five or more subjects including Mathematics and English in the Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate (CSEC) examination?  To what extent do the schools add value to the resources with which the students come into the institutions? The Ministry of Education has been using the answers to these questions to rank the performance of schools as either, being Outstanding, Good, Satisfactory or Poor.

 When we examine the issue of performance in the education system we must widen the focus to include the performance of the Ministry of Education (MoE) as well as schools. Because, the way the MoE functions at the top of the education system is crucial to the effectiveness of schools. Teachers seem to realise that their effectiveness is bound up with that of the MoE. For example, when I asked a number of teachers to outline their role in the education system, among the replies that I received was that of ensuring that the mandate of the MoE, as well as the school’s mission statement, was carried out.

So, how does the MoE maintain the communication link with the schools to ensure that its goals for the education system are met? One principal, writing as a guest columnist in the Sunday Gleaner of June 2, 2013 paints a dismal picture of the Ministry’s stewardship where schools are concerned. His article seems to be in response to the Ministry’s continuing inspection of schools. In his article succinctly entitled, “Inspect Education Ministry, too”, this principal highlights a number of areas of concern to schools:

·         Tardiness in the Ministry - late dissemination of information, teachers and school leaders receiving information to attend meetings or deadlines to submit documents on the day before and even on the day of the event, sometimes long after the event has passed; endless waiting after sending written communication to the ministry to have projects approved, often no response from regional offices even after valiant attempts to follow up, projects that would benefit students stalled or abandoned out of frustration; Teachers having to wait in excess of three years for refunds after studying without taking study leave

·         Poor customer service – teachers are asked to wait up to two years after all documents are sent in before they are finally appointed, many times documents cannot be found after they have been submitted

·         Inadequate financial resources allocated by the ministry to carry out the daily responsibility of a public school for a term or academic year

·         Ministry divesting its financial responsibility to schools – the ‘loading’ off of financial responsibility on the teachers and school leaders – teachers engaging in fund raising activities

 

 This is one perspective of the performance of the MoE in 2013. But, for almost thirty years the government has been championing strategies to modernise the entire public service. This reform has been ongoing under the banner of the New Public Management (NPM). NPM is basically the label given to the reforms that governments have been making to their public service over the last few decades. Several discourses have been developed around the NPM. We can find within these discourses concerns with issues of productivity; effectiveness, efficiency, economy, accountability, transparency and responsiveness of government as well as the restructuring of government agencies; emphasis being placed on managing as opposed to administrating. Also, a key element in these discourses is performance based accountability particularly through contracts; and competitive mechanisms such as contracting-out and internal markets (Aucoin 1990; Hood 1991)

 As regards performance based accountability through contracts, one of the tenets of the NPM, Jamaica is still lagging in its implementation. Only four Permanent Secretaries are working on contractual terms (Osiei and Imhoff-Nwasike, (undated). The others are permanently employed members of the public service enjoying the benefits of this status. And those permanent secretaries on contractual terms, at the expiration of their three year contracts, may be permanently appointed. As regards, the MoE, most of the managers will be on permanent appointments rather than on contractual terms. This may affect their approach to the job.

But, based on what we know about the MoE to date and, based on what we know about NPM reforms that the government has been engaged in for a number of decades now, how are workers being impacted by the discourses of the New Public Management (NPM)? If performativity may be described as a process where signs, for example words, have the power to shape reality then how has the reality of those who work in the Ministry of Education been shaped by these discourses. How has practice changed? How have the administrators in government transitioned to being managers? What are the psychological manifestations of these discourses on them?

S. J. Ball (2012), renowned educator, researcher and writer, in his book Global Education INC. New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary, mentions what I refer to as the “psychological manifestations” of performance based accountability on actors in the education enterprise. These “psychological manifestations” he refers to as being the result of the process of performativity.

Performativity is a pervasive phenomenon. According to Ball, in our activities at work,  performativity demands that we:

make ourselves more effective, [that we] work on ourselves and [demands that we] feel guilty or inadequate if we do not [...].  Performativity is enacted through measures and targets against which we are expected to position ourselves but often in ways that also produce uncertainties about how we should organise ourselves within our work [...] Performativity ‘works’ most powerfully when it is in our heads and our souls. That is, when we do it ourselves, when we take responsibility for working hard, faster and better, thus ‘improving’ our ‘output’, as part of our sense of personal worth and the worth of others [...] Indeed, performativity works best when we come to want for ourselves what is wanted from us, when our moral sense of our desires and ourselves are aligned with its pleasures (p. 30).

According to this view performativity is a state of being that is brought about by the discourse, in this case, about NPM and specifically that element of the discourse which focuses on performance based accountability in government agencies. It is a cultural imperative that seeks to change the status quo. That is, it is a state of being where low productivity is no longer seen as being normal in government. Therefore, it is a state of being as regards the individual and his/her interaction with his work within the context of the government agency.

So, for discourses of NPM to realise the action of productivity i.e. improved performance in the education sector, which is the area of government with which we are concerned, the process will play out as follows: The government, by way of the responsible Minister, makes an utterance regarding its policy direction with regard to a particular issue. This utterance as part of “the way forward” is instituted in the organisation. Managers do their jobs by ensuring that the policy imperatives are implemented. They [should] have targets against which their performance is judged and which provide the basis for sanctions. Sanctions are strictly enforced. This puts pressure on managers to constantly improve their performance. They feel a sense of guilt when they underperform. As this new standard of performance is constantly reinforced practitioners “buy into” its tenets and begin to regulate their lives by these. They become the embodiment of what was envisaged – high performing, self regulating, accountable individuals who see their work ethic as being natural. Their goals and the organisations’ goals are now aligned. Performativity as a process is complete. But performativity is not “in any simple sense a technology of oppression; it is also one of satisfactions and rewards, at least for some (ibid, p. 30).

However, as the hypothetical scenario presented above indicates, as well as the weaknesses in the Ministry of education that that principal outlines, the state of being where the achievement of results on the job is a driving, consuming force and, where one’s sense of self is bound up with the job has not yet been achieved to any extent in the Ministry of Education. Performativity, at least in impacting members of the Ministry of Education to adapt to the changing environmental imperatives in government, is still a work in progress.