Performance indicators and outcomes as measures of educational quality: a cautionary critique‡

Abstract

The current, pervasive concern with educational quality arises from a context of pressure for enhanced educational accountability. This pressure derives from the increasing popularity of economic rationalism, in which a premium is placed on efficiency and effectiveness. Educational accountability in terms of these properties requires that assessments of performance be based upon indicators of educational outcomes in terms of educational costs ‐‐ what is here termed ‘outcomes‐driven education’. The influence of outcomes‐driven education on educational quality is here examined through a philosophical analysis, from a lifelong education perspective. It is argued that the attainment and maintenance of quality in outcomes‐driven education requires the satisfaction of various assumptions with respect to: the specifiability, observability, quantifiability and stability of educational goals and outcomes; the attribution of outcomes to educational events; the appropriateness of consequentialism; the educational efficacy of enlightened self‐interest; the progressiveness, flexibility and essentially empowering nature of the framework; and a view of humanity as an aggregation of autonomous individuals working in a mechanistically rational fashion for the egoistic maximization of their individual self‐interest. To the extent that these assumptions are not satisfied in the actual practice of outcomes‐driven education, educational quality may be diminished through: curricular fragmentation and simplification; the externalization of educational reward; student dependence; and educational conservatism, tokenism, inflexibility, centralization, instrumentalism and functionalism. Outcomes‐driven education may thus be dehumanizing and educationally trivializing ‐encouraging the development of relatively closed, self‐serving, bureaucratic systems of education. The fundamental irony of outcomes‐driven education is that, while its ideal is the enhancement of excellence, individual freedom, liberation, individuality, plurality, creativity, innovativeness and responsiveness, as a practical approach to lifelong education it may be more likely to result in educational mediocrity, servitude, manipulation, uniformity, conformity, constraint, conservatism and unresponsiveness.