Accountability and relevance in educational research

Journal of Philosophy of Education

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 443-459

  Winch, Christopher ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039146143     PISSN: 03098249     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9752.00237     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. James Tooley and Doug Darby (1998) Educational Research: a Critique (London, OFSTED).
2. David Carr (1999) Professional education and professional ethics, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 16.1, pp. 33-46.
3. Paul Ormerod (1994) The Death of Economics (London, Penguin).
4. John Gray (1995) Enlightenment's Wake (London, Routledge): Christopher Winch (1996) Quality and Education (London, Blackwell).
5. See, for example, S. Lawlor, Common Core, Centre for Policy Studies, 1988; Oliver Letwin, Education: the importance of grounding, Centre for Policy Studies, 1988.
6. See, for example, S. Lawlor, Common Core, Centre for Policy Studies, 1988; Oliver Letwin, Education: the importance of grounding, Centre for Policy Studies, 1988.
7. E.g. David Reynolds (1998) Teacher effectiveness: better teachers, better schools, Research Intelligence, 66, pp. 26-29.
8. C. Winch (1997) Accountability, controversy and school effectiveness, in: J. White, M. Barber (eds) Perspectives on School Effectiveness and School Improvement, pp. 61-76, London, Bedford Way Papers, 1997.
9. Plato (1950) The Republic; I. Illich (1971) Deschooling Society (London, Penguin); J-J. Rousseau (1966) (1762) Emile ou l'Education (Paris, Editions Fammarion), English edition translated by Barbara Foxley (London, Dent, 1911); Edmond Holmes (1911), What is and What Might Be (London, Constable); Neil Postman (1970) The Politics of Reading, in: N. Keddie (ed.), Tinker, Tailor . . . The Myth of Cultural Deprivation (London, Penguin, 1973).
10. Plato (1950) The Republic; I. Illich (1971) Deschooling Society (London, Penguin); J-J. Rousseau (1966) (1762) Emile ou l'Education (Paris, Editions Fammarion), English edition translated by Barbara Foxley (London, Dent, 1911); Edmond Holmes (1911), What is and What Might Be (London, Constable); Neil Postman (1970) The Politics of Reading, in: N. Keddie (ed.), Tinker, Tailor . . . The Myth of Cultural Deprivation (London, Penguin, 1973).
11. Plato (1950) The Republic; I. Illich (1971) Deschooling Society (London, Penguin); J-J. Rousseau (1966) (1762) Emile ou l'Education (Paris, Editions Fammarion), English edition translated by Barbara Foxley (London, Dent, 1911); Edmond Holmes (1911), What is and What Might Be (London, Constable); Neil Postman (1970) The Politics of Reading, in: N. Keddie (ed.), Tinker, Tailor . . . The Myth of Cultural Deprivation (London, Penguin, 1973).
12. Plato (1950) The Republic; I. Illich (1971) Deschooling Society (London, Penguin); J-J. Rousseau (1966) (1762) Emile ou l'Education (Paris, Editions Fammarion), English edition translated by Barbara Foxley (London, Dent, 1911); Edmond Holmes (1911), What is and What Might Be (London, Constable); Neil Postman (1970) The Politics of Reading, in: N. Keddie (ed.), Tinker, Tailor . . . The Myth of Cultural Deprivation (London, Penguin, 1973).
13. Plato (1950) The Republic; I. Illich (1971) Deschooling Society (London, Penguin); J-J. Rousseau (1966) (1762) Emile ou l'Education (Paris, Editions Fammarion), English edition translated by Barbara Foxley (London, Dent, 1911); Edmond Holmes (1911), What is and What Might Be (London, Constable); Neil Postman (1970) The Politics of Reading, in: N. Keddie (ed.), Tinker, Tailor . . . The Myth of Cultural Deprivation (London, Penguin, 1973).
14. James Tooley (1995) Disestablishing Education (Aldershot, Avebury).
15. A Davis (1998) The Limits of Educational Assessment (Oxford, Blackwell), suggests that educators should not be accountable for money which was intended to be spent on educational purposes that they deem to be immoral (p. 23). While this is a perfectly acceptable point, it can be replied to those who justify not spending money on the purpose for which it was intended on these grounds, that in good faith, they should not have accepted the money in the first place if they did not intend to spend it on the purposes for which it was allocated.
16. The position is now becoming more complex due to increasing emphasis on the practical value of educational research in the next RAE (in the year 2001).
17. The masculine pronoun is used here in a gender neutral fashion. For a justification of this practice, see C. Winch and K. Sharp, Equal opportunities and language: a critique of the new orthodoxy, 1994. Studies in Higher Education, 19.2, pp. 163-175.
18. G. Woodhouse and H. Goldstein (1988) Educational performance indicators and LEA league tables. Oxford Review of Education, 14.3, pp. 321-320.
19. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (London, Penguin, 1984), for a compelling account of how this kind of unconscious bias may work on even well-intentioned researchers.
20. None of these observations should be taken to suggest that actual workers in the field carry out their work with anything less than complete integrity. They do, however, give us an insight into the pressures that they are likely to work under.
21. This may also cause problems if the radical researcher is not only committed to radical solutions but also to radical research methods not recognised by the main body of the research community.
22. The reader will readily appreciate that this difficulty is closely related to that of unconscious bias in empirical research. Overcoming both of these requires that the researcher possesses high levels of integrity.
23. That this is not just speculative paranoid fantasy can be seen from accounts such as that of U. Clark (1994) Bringing English to order: a personal account of the NCC English evaluation project. English in Education, 28.1, pp. 33-38.
24. Tooley and Darby, op. cit. p. 12.