Democracy Distracted in an Era of Accountability: Teacher Education Against Neoliberalism (original) (raw)

2016, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies

Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time,. . .-Eliot (1980, III, p. 120) Democracy distracted by the politics of accountability 1 and the public's disaffection in an ideologically bound culture of accountability, further defines the work ahead for teacher educators in an era of neoliberalism. We now live in "the audit society" (Power, 1999) wherein power and purpose are brought together in the institutional arrangements of accountability in ways that cause us to focus significantly upon the form and relationships of the educational systems and the public sphere (Ranson, 2003). Importantly, there is pressing need for teacher educators to understand that measures of accountability that sort populations and marginalize subpopulations while creating "a resource dependency and a hierarchical power structure which maintains that dependency" (McNeil, 1999, p. 10) places our educational systems and educator preparation programs at risk. In particular, neoliberal governmentality 2 links the university to economics and an economic model with the university (Jankowski & Provezis, 2014) viewed as a key driver in the knowledge economy. Teacher education is thus commodified (Schwartzman, 2013; Smyth & Shacklock, 1998), defined through economic rationality, and the concept of accountability has grown more complex with changes in society. Teacher educators must necessarily understand the problematic and political nature of their work as neoliberalism advances on higher education (Robertson, 2008; Saunders, 2010) and understand that a more democratic educational system and a more democratic accountability system rest, in part, on standards of complexity that work within the educational system to foster a more democratic society. The past several decades have witnessed the advancement of neoliberalism and with it a "New Public Managerialism" leading to the subordination of education as a social institution (Hill, 2006). 3 Before the rise of the technical-managerial approach, Biesta (2004) explains that a "tradition which sees accountability as a system of (mutual) responsibility, rather 672676C SCXXX10.