Quality. It is such a nice civil service-political magic word. Sounds good and nobody can be against it. So shout as a politician that you want more quality and all heads start nodding busily.
State Secretary for Cultural Affairs Zijlstra also likes quality. Says he. For instance, when it comes to cultural education. In his memorandum More than quality he says he wants to work on the quality of cultural education. Nice, but then you have to be able to say in one way or another what that quality is. And how to measure it. That is why the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science set research bureau Oberon to work to come up with a definition.
Did that work out?
Well.
At the very least, the report "Quality framework for cultural education by cultural institutions" shows that the search for a definition is complicated. You quickly get lost in technocratic schemata where all sorts of things can be questioned. For instance, are you talking about the quality in which the infrastructure for education is set up, about the quality of the projects themselves, and what should those projects achieve? Are we talking about artistic or educational quality? Or about a sum of all those qualities at once?
Based on theoretical literature and interviews with experts, Oberon drew up a survey that asked institutions for their opinions on quality. The experts Oberon interviewed tell us right away that in this, you have to take into account the diversity of the arts field and the various providers of education projects. In other words, there are apples and oranges.
The experts put their finger on another sore spot: if you want to articulate what quality is, you have to have a vision. An idea of where you want to go. The extent to which you achieve your goals is then the quality. However, the problem is that schools, institutions and the state secretary have a totally different vision of those goals.
Experts disagree on how to measure quality in such cases. Some argue for a business model, others for a scientific model based a scientific theory.
For institutions, according to the survey, the quality of cultural education lies mainly in the quality of the staff, the content of the product and in the passion they know how to convey for art.
Incidentally, the experts consulted also note that such a survey does not make much sense at all. With such a remote questionnaire, you get no picture of the true quality of an institution.
So quality is proving difficult to define. But yes. You get an assignment from the stas, who wants to know what quality is, so you search diligently. Imperturbably, Oberon thus runs through the various ways in which you could measure that (undefined) quality, and one by one the experts fire off the solutions.
Maybe a satisfaction survey? But that says nothing about the skills gained. Measure how often schools return to an institution for a project then? But surely that is just a satisfaction survey in disguise?
Some experts think you should draw up a list of indicators, while others again think you should assess quality 'by measure'.
In one case, the problem is that objective clues are thus impossible to find; in the other, a customised study says nothing, if you don't have any benchmark have to contrast it with.
Yet that tailoring still seems somewhat interesting if you start from the question of what schools and institutions actually expect from each other when assessing.
"Measuring the quality of cultural education is a complicated issue," the researchers note somewhat bemusedly in the conclusion of their study. It turns out that all aspects of cultural education cannot be captured by a criterion at all.
Still, Oberon draws up a brave technocratic diagram, in which no fewer than 13 points can be found by which you could measure an aspect of quality, But again, that diagram turns out to be relative:
"Incidentally, these indicators still need further operationalisation if you really want to measure whether the returns have been achieved."
And a little further on:
"The basic set we present serves as a guiding framework and cannot be applied directly to quality Measure."
And so we were back to square one, because the researchers were actually looking for quality frameworks that could be operationalised in the practice of cultural education. So we are 22 pages and not a stitch further.
So it seems Zijlstra's call for quality is futile, because that quality can hardly be measured without a vision. You must first formulate what you want those children to learn from cultural education. That is a political choice, to which institutions can adjust their policies.
A vision.
And so there Zijlstra has a small issue to address.
Click to access Kwaliteitsnotitie.pdf
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
They should have sent Zijlstra Cullard's report, criteria enough it seems to me.
Comments are closed.