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Burnout, bundles, and bureaucracy: ECEC and school based teaching on a precipice
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Freya Lucas
Aug 21, 2024
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Educational researcher Dr Carly Sawatzki recently sounded an alarm about a “flawed ideology” which she fears is having a profound impact on education, and creating a new - and potentially concerning - job market for education professionals.
While Dr Sawatzki’s piece is centralised around the world of schools, there are many lessons which have carry over and common themes with the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector.Her piece for AARE EduResearch Matters begins by sharing an observation of social media spaces filled with teachers. As in the ECEC context, posters are asking questions such as “I’ve been teaching for three years but am burnt out and ready to quit. I’m thinking I could get a job writing classroom resources for teachers. Where can I apply?”
In ECEC, there are often questions like this, asking how else ECEC qualifications may be used, the process for getting into a role which is not dealing directly with children, how to move into a training and assessment space, or about the path other people took when stepping away from ECEC.
Questions such as these, Dr Sawatzki argues, signal “the impact of a flawed ideology that has been shaping education in Australia for several decades.”
The more that governments, and in the context of ECEC, approved providers, view education as a place for standardisation, a place where inputs and outputs are the same, a place of increased administrative, accountability and reporting activities, the faster those who are drawn to educate and care for children burn out.
A market driven approach, applied to a non market setting
The application of neoliberalism to education, be it ECEC or school based settings, she notes, is trying to take a market driven approach and apply it to something which is not, and never has been, a market.
In essence, neoliberalism sees economic rationalism and general business principles applied to the way education is managed.
“The story goes that education can be streamlined, neatly packaged and marketed like any other commodity,” she said.
While the argument is that making the curriculum and the delivery of teaching, learning and assessment more similar than different across locations will ensure equality of access and produce better outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged students.
Although this “commonsense” messaging has appeal to policymakers and voters, Dr Sawatzki argues that this type of thinking exercises power by framing educators and children as human capital.
“It sets out to measure and monitor their productivity and performance. In some parts of the world, teachers might be understood to be tailors of distinction,” she said.
“In Australia they are more likely to be cast as sweatshop machinists under quality control.”
The core business of educating and caring for children, she continued, has been swept to one side, and in its place has come a range of new administrative, accountability and reporting activities at the very time when caring for children has also become more complex and relationally demanding.
As experienced educators lament the loss of professional trust and creative agency, and competing demands for their time, policymakers and approved providers defer to the market for scalable responses that tell educators what to do and how and when to do it.
Bundled solutions pitched as problem solvers in a box
Against this backdrop, Dr Sawatzki said, has arisen a range of ‘out of the box’ solutions, which promise to meet outcomes, reduce administrative burden, and get educators back doing what they do best.
From external teams designing packages of learning to consultants brought in to use ‘evidence based practice’ to turn assessment and rating results around, the ECEC market, as with the schools space, is flooded with potential solutions to issues… something that may be causing more problems than it solves.
“Research shows that neoliberal policy moves are reducing teachers’ job enjoyment, negatively impacting their health and wellbeing, and contributing to attrition. Teachers are stressed, burnt out and leaving the profession in droves,” Dr Sawatzki notes.
“Ultimately, education has turned on itself and real economic and educational progress is being undermined.”
A time for tough questions
As the ECEC sector awaits the release of the Productivity Commission’s report, and with it potentially a fundamental shift in the way early childhood is perceived and implemented in the community, the author has some “tough questions” about the purpose and direction of education policy in Australia.
- Who is in the driver’s seat and can they be trusted to deliver the sort of equitable and excellent education we want for young people?
- What vested interests link those spruiking “evidence-based” education, and those selling commercial solutions?
- Will a better and fairer education system ever be possible under these circumstances?
“Right now, it seems that for every issue that neoliberalism might solve, it sustains and creates several more,” she concludes. Dr Carly Sawatzki is a teacher educator and educational researcher at Deakin University. She supports teachers of mathematics to teach differently, by helping them to connect students’ classroom learning with the real world. Carly is internationally recognised for her thought leadership on young people’s financial education.
Find her original work, as first shared on AARE EduResearch Matters, here.
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