The Impact of Neoliberal Education Policy on Teacher Autonomy and School Practices in Latvia

Neoliberal education policy in Latvia has created a space for various types of practices aimed at measuring the efficiency of schools and teachers. Their implementation is required by state and municipal policies, which also involve private organizations that compile school ratings and award the best-performing institutions. Public money earmarked for educational research partially funds research institutes, which create tools for assessing quality and effectiveness. Thus, researchers legitimize and support the direction of education policy.

Schools adapt to the requirements set by the policy. They not only seek to subordinate all their work to the established criteria, but they also create new practices that reproduce the required control and performativity. One such practice is the measurement of the quality of teachers' work by observing whether teacher-led lessons meet the "good practice" criteria set by policy. Schools are developing their own quality control systems for evaluating teacher-led lessons; in some cities, these systems are standardized across all schools, creating a special infrastructure to support them.

The limited understanding of what constitutes a "good lesson," as defined by education policy, leads to a uniform learning process — all the lessons observed begin and end in the same way, as required by the set quality criteria. Despite the fact that teachers criticize the practice of lesson observations as humiliating, which incentivizes them to pretend, schools cannot refuse to participate, as these actions affect the assessment of the school by the State Service for Education Quality.

The broader consequences of neoliberalism include the oversimplification of the complex nature of teaching and learning. Teachers are starting to believe that the uniform actions demanded by education policy and supervised by school management represent good teaching and learning, thereby depriving them of their professional agency.