Punishing and Privatizing Public Educators


Noemi Rosario Martinez, Simon Fraser University

Many teachers are drawn to education because they find the work important and meaningful. This paper examines how this plays out in practice–how teachers find and make meaning on a day to day basis. In the growing moral panic around education, teachers are being deemed “groomers” corrupting students through “woke indoctrination,”; new legislation in Florida limits teaching around racism, gender, and sexuality. However, even before this, many teachers struggled to grapple with the meaning of their work in the era of “accountability,” a neoliberal education paradigm that focuses on efficiency enforced through metrics like high-stakes standardized testing and school grades. Now, testing begins as early as kindergarten and spans across most subjects. These factors that structure education are factors around which teachers struggle to make sense of their work, finding more or less meaning through compliance or defiance. But regardless of how teachers feel about them, these metrics are used to evaluate both students and teachers. This research is inspired by Labour Process Theory in that it centers the qualitative experience of work as a valuable source of insight, partially demonstrated by control over and knowledge of the labour process (Braverman 1974, Jaros 2010). It also draws on a Marxist conception of alienation, David Graeber’s analysis in Bullshit Jobs, and James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak to make sense of the work experiences of educators. My research was conducted in Florida, where I attended School Board meetings and School Advisory Council meetings, and interviewed twelve educators (including one principal and one school board official) in order to answer the question of  how the relationship between teachers’ autonomy and management control of the labour process has been changing. Interviews elucidated the forms of both everyday and organized resistance that teachers use to protect what is meaningful about their work (which is different for each teacher) and reduce what is seen as meaningless or harmful, without risking discipline. While discussions of the labour process often focus on the degradation of skills, these findings emphasize that the problems teachers have with work are not, or not just, about skill, but also about whether or how teachers are able to find meaning in their work. The struggles that educators engage in can’t be made sense of just through the lens of pay–nor can the harms that they’re experiencing be reduced to that–they also emphasized their efforts to do good work, even when that differed from or went beyond what the state demanded. This paper argues that some educators experience increasing alienation because neoliberal and right wing policies deprive them of meaningful work and that meaningful work is so important that educators are doing what they can to push back against its restriction, largely through forms of everyday resistance. Since meaningfulness of the labour process is a central point of contention for teachers it thus, tentatively, may be an element that pushes workers out of public schools and into more loosely regulated charter schools. This then serves to contribute, to some degree, to taking the management of education out of public hands and into private ones. More broadly, this may have implications for conceptions of good work overall, beyond the education sector.

This paper will be presented at the following session: