The “Datafication” of Teaching: Can Teachers Speak Back to the Numbers?

Abstract

Teachers face considerable and increasing pressure in their working lives. Labor intensification compels teachers to work faster, harder and longer. However, teachers also experience increasing external control over what they teach and how they teach. These processes are increasingly made possible by the "datafication" of teaching, whereby the educational process is increasingly transformed into numbers that allow measurement, comparison and the functioning of high stakes accountability systems linked to rewards and sanctions. Whilst there is no question that being able to use student assessment data to support learning has an important place in teachers' repertoire of skills, "datafication" refers to the use of data in a way that has become increasingly detached from supporting learning and is much more concerned with the management of teacher performance as an end in itself. This article presents two currents of critical thought in relation to teachers' work, labor process theory and post-structural analyses grounded in the concept of performativity, and discusses them as a way of "making sense" of teachers' work and the "datafication" of teaching, with a particular focus on questions of control and resistance.It seeks to understand why, despite the pressures on teachers, teacher resistance has seldom developed in ways, at times, or on a scale, that both experience and theoretical insight might have predicted. There are clearly significant differences between the two perspectives presented in this article, not least in the ways they conceptualize and explain "resistance." However common ground is identifiable and the two theoretical approaches can be bridged in a form that can be productive for those seeking to "speak back to the numbers." In looking to broker this theoretical divide, I argue that frame theory, rooted within the sociology of social Running head: THE "DATAFICATION" OF TEACHING 4 movements, can offer a fruitful way of theory bridging, whilst also providing the basis for a wider politics of transformation. The article offers several examples of grassroots initiatives formed to oppose standardized testing in England and which provide practical examples of this "ideas work" in action.

The Mexican teachers' movement in the context of neoliberal education policy and strategies for resistance

“…141–142). These surveillance methods resemble Stevenson's () description of the rise of “Neo‐Taylorism” as a form of governance over teachers' work. Teachers' professional autonomy is undermined and deskilled as their work is analyzed into “scientifically quantifiable” components, fed into a larger “datafication” of their work.…”

“…The trajectory of education in Mexico should be understood within both the global context of neoliberal education policy, particularly as reflected in the United States, and the historical evolution of power and society within Mexico itself. As Stevenson () contends, insights on its consequences for teachers' work can be drawn from Braverman's () labor process theory on the rise of managerial control and the concurrent deskilling of labor. A key manifestation of the neoliberalization of education has been the erosion of teachers' professional autonomy.…”

“…This has occurred through the loss of professional judgment and increased subordination to the control of supervisors (school principals and superintendents) via the monitoring of their work by standardized evaluations of themselves and their students (Bocking, ). The increasing use of quantitative data by governments, purporting to measure teacher effectiveness and ensure their “accountability,” while in practice undermining teachers' control over their own work has been described as the “datafication” of teaching by Stevenson (). According to Stevenson, this process is about more than the intensification of teachers' work “getting more for less” in the form of steadily rising test scores in a context of fiscal austerity.…”

“…Teachers' professional autonomy is undermined and deskilled as their work is analyzed into “scientifically quantifiable” components, fed into a larger “datafication” of their work. As Stevenson () argues, “There can be no understanding the work of teachers without understanding the “tyranny of numbers...” Numbers are now central to creating an apparently uncontestable truth in which teachers are measured, ranked, judged, and rewarded or punished.” (p. 550). Absent the power to “speak back” to seemingly objective data, an “ideal form” of pedagogy can then be increasingly prescribed according to a quantitative distillation of “best practices.”…”

Making sense of student data in teacher professional development

“…Student data are also collected at a larger scale, where schools, districts or even state agencies collect and monitor data, which, in turn, are used to map teacher quality by comparison to others. As a result, student data have also become increasingly important in framing the working lives and experience of teachers (Ball 2015, Stevenson 2017. However, when school management uses student data to judge or compare teachers, there are risks involved such as datafication, being the use of data as a management tool in itself, and performativity, that is, a culture or system that is focused on maximization, targets and the worth of individuals for the greater good (Ball 2003, Lloyd and Davis 2018.…”