The QTD may also be argued to be based on a“Janus-faced”polity ideology of
the“responsible”teacher (O’Neill 2010 ). In this ideology, the teacher is simulta-
neously the cause of and the solution to schooling inequalities. On the one hand,
responsible teachers are asserted to be sensitive to and appreciative of the cultural
situatedness of individual learners. These teachers are claimed to actively assist
learners in their classrooms to overcome the combined effects of structural
socio-economic disadvantage and cultural invisibility (including class-ism and
racial-ism). On the other hand, teachers who cannot do this are claimed to be solely
responsible for the localised educational failure oftheirstudents. Teachers are
further pathologised in QTD through the frequent assertion that the primary reason
students fail is because their teachers subscribe, consciously or unconsciously, to a
so-called “deficit theory” of poor and ethnic minority students’capacities to
succeed at school (Persell 1981 ).
The term“responsible”therefore connotes a highly ambiguous and ambivalent
stance among the politicians, officials and academics who sustain the QTD towards
state school teachers. Overall, the QTD seeks to minimise the importance of con-
textual effects on learning outcomes, and maximise the importance of what teachers
do. According to QTD, if classroom teachers exemplify the language, practices and
relations of“quality teaching”, then all studentsshallsucceed.
However, in promoting this stance, the QTD not only ignores the
well-established effects of non-classroom-related practices on students’learning
andcapacity for learning, it also ignores the material conditions in which classroom
teachers work each day, and, more specifically, the ways in which these material
conditions actively militate against the possibility of teachers engaging in the sorts
of pedagogical work that is proselytised through the QTD. In other words, it is a
poverty ofmaterial conditions, not a poverty ofteacher dispositions, that is the
significant education policy issue. Moreover, the QTD may be seen to be not only
implausible but also untruthful. Comparative data such as that published annually
by the OECD in its omnibusEducation at a Glancereport, consistently demon-
strates that New Zealand teachers are under-resourced compared with their overseas
counterparts, yet it comes from exactly the same policy texts and think-tank reports
that officials use to promote the view that quality teaching is the major determinant
of whether or not students succeed.
Socially critical commentaries from sections of the academy and organised
labour in New Zealand have over the years attempted to maintain a discursive space
in which issues of class and cultural location are seen to matter, and that teachers
may only be held to account for their occupational behaviours and judgments, not
student outcomes. Within QTD, however, as in neoliberal discourse generally,
educational concepts and vocabularies have been appropriated, redefined and
deployed towards technocratic, NPM ends. The plausibility, popular appeal and
self-evident rationality of the QTD force its critics to engage in a tactical game to
try and recapture colonised educational discourses. The danger in so doing is that
academics (including teacher educators) and organised labour help to shore up the
QTD rather than discredit it. But academics and organised labour also have a shared
responsibility to ensure that comprehensive empirical data on the material
498 J. O’Neill