Punishing and Privatizing Public Educators


Noemi Rosario Martinez, Simon Fraser University

Public education is fraught, and those who work in public schools experience and reflect many of the ideological and economic changes occurring around them. There emerge tensions not just between the different levels of school governance, from the school’s own administration to the federal government, but also between educators and outside stakeholders such as parents and community members, as well as between educators as workers and their employers. In the US, these tensions have repeatedly surfaced throughout recent history, from the mandates and firings that occurred at schools during the Red Scare, to the media panic around an allegedly left leaning national history curriculum, to today’s “culture war” in which educators are portrayed as indoctrinating children into a liberal lifestyle. This culture war is playing out amidst changes that have solidified in previous decades around accountability and parent choice in schools. Unlike in the past however, it is consequential that there exists today a more robust system of charter schools and state funding for private schools than during past waves of anti-education rhetoric and policy. My research operates within the framework of Labour Process Theory by centering the qualitative experience of work as a valuable source of insight into class struggle, partially demonstrated by control over and knowledge of the labour process (Braverman 1974, Thompson and Smith 2010). This research was conducted through fieldwork, particularly twelve semi-structured interviews with educators (including one principal and one school district employee) in the state of Florida along with observation of School Board and School Advisory Council meetings. This paper draws on notions of subjectivity and interiority to improve understandings around how the qualitative experience of educators as workers is a central locus in the neoliberal and right-wing push to dismantle public education, particularly for those who work in conservative environments. Educators’ statements in interviews often reflected the tensions around policies and measures with emphasis on accountability trends like state level standards accompanied by testing, which have restricted them from expressing their subjectivity through their work–this further exacerbated by lack of time due to problems like large class sizes and difficulty dealing with student behaviour. New legislation such as the ‘Stop WOKE Act’ also creates fear that can prevent educators from speaking with students about different aspects of gender, sexual, and racial identity, further constraining their expression and connection to their interiority through work. I argue that these changes in the labour process are one element that push workers out of this field, and thus serve to contribute, to some degree, to taking the management of education out of public hands and into private ones. Many public school educators discussed their uncertainty and anxiety about education as a long-term career, while educators I spoke to who worked at (by definition, privately managed and outside of the authority of the public institutions like School Board) charter schools discussed their satisfaction with their instructional autonomy and greater ease of removing misbehaving students from their classroom. Educators’ experience of their subjectivity at work is under examined as a vector for privatization and neoliberalism when compared with other aspects of this movement, such as political contributions towards charter school organizations and campaigns, anti-union sentiment, and austerity budgets for schools, though these are all hugely important factors. This shift also owes some of its existence to pressures exerted by parents and political organizations, such as Moms for Liberty, which I assert have increasing influence in the management and control of education. Ultimately this paper will discuss how these changes in education connect to the idea within Labour Process Theory that the labour process functions as a site of class struggle.

This paper will be presented at the following session: