conditions of classroom teachers’work are regularly gathered, analysed and pub-
licly reported. In this way, the amounts and types of government investment in state
education may properly be viewed as contributing factors to the quality of peda-
gogical relations in classrooms.
Under-resourcing materially affects what it is reasonable, and not, to expect
classroom teachers to contribute to the reduction of structural educational
inequalities in schooling. The collation, analysis and dissemination of empirical data
from official and officially preferred sources thus facilitate a counter-hegemonic
discursive process of demonstrating that teachers’responsibilities and account-
abilities have increased over time, while the levels of state investment in resources
to support teachers’expanded responsibilities have declined.
The QTD masks and distracts attention from the gradual but inexorable with-
drawal of government from its statutory obligation to fully fund universal free
schooling, which was a basic tenet of the progressive sentiment in education.
33.3 Partiality
The QTD is a highly selective and partial account of the language, practices and
relations of classroom teaching. The issue of“quality teaching”is not centrally
concerned with the“best”teachers in our schools, nor the“worst”, but with the
overwhelming majority of ordinary classroom teachers who strive every day to do
meaningful work in demanding material conditions. Some days, they manage to
promote meaningful learning in most or all of their classes, some days they do not.
Over some terms and some years they contribute more to aggregated student out-
comes than over some others. Ordinary teachers“perform”better on a daily, termly
or annual basis with some of their students and classes than they do with others. That
is simply the reality of school teaching where many factors outside the classroom
teacher’s control contribute directly and indirectly to the quality of students’per-
sonal and social learning (Snook and O’Neill 2014 ). Teachers can reasonably be
expected to plan diligently, teach energetically and assess the artefacts of students’
learning in a timely and constructive manner, but they cannot guarantee that their
students will learn, nor that their students’learning outcomes will improve in line
with official expectations or targets. Teachers can really only“add value”to the
quality of their classroom relations with students, and this is consequently the only
element of teaching performance for which they can reasonably be held accountable.
No-one could sensibly disagree with the assertion that the country needs the
most competent teachers possible to support young people’s learning in classrooms.
Equally, no-one could sensibly disagree with the assertion that incompetent
teachers should not be allowed anywhere near a classroom. That is not the issue.
References in the QTD to“excellence”and“incompetence”with regard to the
quality of teaching serve only to masque the material conditions that support or
inhibit most teachers’capacities to do their job to the best of their ability (i.e. to
create the optimum conditions in which students may choose to learn).
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