Data, performativity and the erosion of trust in teachers

This paper explores how trust in teacher professional judgment has been reconstituted through the globalised trends of performative accountability and reductive data-driven logics. The article draws upon empirical research from interviews with teachers and school leaders as well as observations of teacher preparation days, classroom and staff professional learning communities (PLCs), as part of a larger study of schooling practices in two geographically and contextually bound Queensland public schools. The paper focuses attention upon the socio-political, material-economic and cultural-discursive conditions inscribed in how data are currently understood and deployed, and how these conditions constrain trust in teachers, devaluing teachers’ own professional judgment. Specifically, we flag how the practices and conditions that constrained trust were manifest in a) pressures to ensure teachers generated and collected data on an ongoing basis to substantiate their claims about student learning, and b) a perceived mistrust amongst parents and a subsequent need to justify decision-making on the basis of ‘hard evidence’.