Education, professionalism and the quest for accountability : hitting the target but missing the point / Jane Green.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- From concern to doubt, from doubt to critique -- Quest for accountability : the managerial response -- The lure of the explicit : managerial modes of accountability and the ideal of transparency -- Responsibility and accountability -- Accountability, answerability, and the virtue of responsibleness : sketch a neo-Aristotelian model of practical rationality -- Quest for accountability : the neo-Aristotelian response -- Return of the lure of the explicit : "making the implicit explicit" -- "Knowing how to" : further attempts to make practical knowledge explicit -- Public trust and accountability : what public? whose trust? which accountability? -- Conclusion.

This book focuses on education and its relation to professional accountability as viewed from two different, but not unrelated, perspectives. First, the book is about the work of professionals in schools and colleges (teachers, head teachers, leaders, principals, directors and educational managers, et cetera) and the detrimental effects which our present system of accountability {u2013} and the managerialism which this system creates {u2013} have had on education, its practice, its organization, its conduct and its content. It is also about the professional education (the occupational/professional formation and development) of practitioners in communities other than educational ones and how they, too, contend with the effects of this system on their practices. These different perspectives represent two sides of the same problem: that whatever one{u2019}s métier {u2013} whether a teacher, nurse, social worker, community officer, librarian, civil servant, etc {u2013} all who now work in institutions designed to serve the public are expected to reorganize their thoughts and practice in accordance with a "performance" management model of accountability which encourages a rigid bureaucracy, one which translates regulation and monitoring procedures, guidelines and advice into inflexible and obligatory compliance. A careful scrutiny of the underlying rationale of this "managerial" model shows how and why it may be expected, paradoxically, to make practices less accountable {u2013} and, in the case of education, less educative.