Neoliberal Education Reform

Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts

Sarah A. Robert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317567073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The restructuring of teaching is a global issue, the result of a transnational movement of policy. Gender shapes the occupational reform and binds the global-to-the-local movement of reform ideas. Gender is also implicated in how policy is done and how it leads to particular outcomes. This volume examines the behind-the-scenes work done to make sense of reform and implement it during the workday and questions the new forms and controls over teaching reforms—the labor process—revealed to understand the implications of neoliberal education reform on teachers' work.

Based on ethnographic research undertaken at public high schools in Argentina, this volume introduces the everyday work lives of teachers. It includes interviews and observations revealing what it means to be a teacher in the reform context, and explores the ways masculinities and femininities shape teachers' decision-making about reforms. At a time when teachers are at the center of political controversy around the world, this volume is an important reminder that school change is about changing the work of teachers.

1 Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments

Introduction

This chapter explains the theoretical framework woven from the fields of gender, work, and organizations, gender policy analysis, and labor process theory. I situate teachers as workers at the center of educational change. I elaborate the reform process as a collusion of the gendered nature of work and the gendered nature of policy whose outcomes are best understood by exploring how teachers put policy into practice in and out of the classroom. Through gendered policy enactments, teachers negotiate the forms and purposes of control over their work and public education.

Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss the theoretical standpoints from which I construct the study and analyze the data. I continue to build the concepts of gender, work, and neoliberal education reform that provide a vista from which to examine the transformation of teachers’ work on the ground. I isolate and critique the ways that gender is involved in teachers’ policy enactment. By policy enactment, I refer to Ball, Maguire, and Braun’s (2012) elaboration:

sets of education policies are ‘made sense of,’ mediated and struggled over, and sometimes ignored, or, in another word, enacted in schools. Enactments are collective and collaborative, but not just simply in the arm fuzzy sense of teamwork, although that is there, but also in the interaction and inter-connection between diverse actors, texts, talk, technology and objects (artefacts) which constitute ongoing responses to policy. (p. 3)

In the pages that follow are findings that detail how teachers produce meaning for policies and then transform that meaning into policy practices, or reasons why they do not. I found this to be the most productive way to understand how teachers do policy in their everyday work lives and to, literally, “find” it in data.

I also complicate enactment to reflect the literature on the gendered nature of work, of workers, and of educational policy. Neoliberal education policy is enacted in contexts where advantage and disadvantage exists. Teachers’ enactment is constrained or buttressed by this uneven terrain. Understanding how enactment shapes and is shaped by gender requires framing teaching work and policy within historical and sociocultural contexts and constructions of feminine and feminized work. What is revealed as a result of conceptualizing teachers’ gendered policy engagements is in the four data-driven chapters that follow.

Gendered Work and Workers

Whether instructing or doing a multitude of other tasks that support the classroom, teachers work within a labor market that is “a socially constructed and politically mediated structure of conflict and accommodation among contending forces” (Peck, 1996, p. 4–5, author’s emphasis). Furthermore, teachers as public employees are at the center of political controversy as that labor market and their place of work remain the focus of neoliberal reform efforts. In the United States, for example, there has been an increase in teacher-aimed reforms focused specifically on teacher workforce issues (Superfine, Gottlieb, & Smylie, 2012). Controlling teachers and their work is a priority, seemingly the priority, of neoliberal reform agendas du jour.

Renewing Labor Process Theory

Neoliberalism in education may be surrounded by discourses of changing education. This often overshadows the way that reforms change the organizational structure of the workplace and the occupations that work within it. More importantly, what is overlooked is the way that neoliberalism transforms control of education and education workers, as well as the purpose of education. Central to labor or industrial studies are the inherent tensions within capitalism over control of the meaning and forms of work.

Alan Reid (2003) urges educational researchers to revisit labor process theory as a productive means of seeking answers to questions concerning control and purpose behind global calls to reform schools. He outlines a brief history of labor process theory, its application to education, and the debates over and corrections to labor process theory based on those debates. He argues persuasively for a renewed application to understanding changes to teachers’ work. As reform of education continues unabated, this call to renewal is timely.

Labor process theory can help to place the specificities of local practice in relationship to the imperatives for control that are stitched into the fabric of the structures and practices of education systems. In this way, labor process theory can offer powerful insights into what is happening to teachers’ work. (p. 571)

Attending to the correctives to labor process theory, researchers must find a means to overcome a singular focus on control and its effect. Applying an ethnographic lens to large-scale reform while focusing on teachers’ gendered policy enactments complicates policy analysis, bringing context and practice into view. More importantly, this study suggests a need to question the meanings and discourses surrounding neoliberal reform. As will be revealed in the chapters that follow, teachers’ policy enactments raise questions regarding the very nature of reform objectives.

The neoliberal teacher-subject idealized in reform is an “abstract categor[y] that [has] no occupants, no human bodies, no gender” (Acker, 1990, p. 149). Yet the “hypothetical worker” imagined to fill this disembodied category is male, free from the “legitimate obligations” (p. 149) associated with women (i.e., child bearing and raising) and better suited to work in a capitalist structure. As Acker states:

Rational-technical, ostensibly gender-neutral control systems are built upon and conceal a gendered substructure (Smith 1988) in which men’s bodies fill the abstract jobs. Use of such abstract systems continually reproduces the underlying gender assumptions and the subordinated or excluded place of women. (p. 154)

The hypothetical teacher, however, has traditionally been a woman. The work structure, including pay, responsibilities, and educational preparation has been constructed around legitimate obligations associated with women in Argentina and elsewhere in the world (Apple, 1986; Biklen, 1995; Cortina & San Román, 2006). For more than a century, more women have been teachers (feminine). The work they perform also is considered women’s work (Morgade & Bellucci, 1997). As such it is revered less, paid less, and subject to intense scrutiny (feminized).

Take, for example, the fact that teachers’ salaries continue to lag behind inflation. Education, unlike other economic sectors, has slowly recuperated a fraction of salaries lost during periods of structural adjustment in the last decades of the 20th century. Dirié and Oiberman (1999) found in their analysis of teachers’ salaries between 1980 and 1990 that industrial work salaries decreased by 14 percent, while elementary and secondary teachers lost 40 percent of their salary (p. 19). This is a phenomenon that some of the most prominent educational researchers have questioned, considering that schooling remains, at least rhetorically, the foundation for improving Argentina’s economic growth and democracy. How can teachers and their collective organizations have failed to gain salary and benefits while almost all other sectors have, including those that do not figure prominently into the nation’s political, economic, and social plans to globalize (see Tiramonti, 2001)?

The feminine and feminized nature of teaching is nuanced and merits dissection. It perhaps provides a plausible explanation to Tiramonti’s question. Men are in the minority, but they have entered the teaching profession, potentially challenging the symbolic image of the teacher-mother and the feminized quality of work performed (Fischman, 2000). While teaching continues to be performed largely by women and to be considered women’s work, referring to teaching as feminized does not equate to an understanding of how feminization is produced.

I adapted Acker’s five interactive gendering processes to women and men teachers’ understandings and experiences of neoliberal education reform as a productive means to probe how the gendering process of the teaching occupation colludes with attempts to reform that work. The five processes are:

1. Construction of divisions along lines of gender
2. Construction of symbols and images
3. Patterned interactions of women and men, women and women, men and men that enact dominance and submission
4. Production of gendered components of individual identity
5. Creation of and conceptualization of social structures into an organizational logic.

Several studies suggest how historical and contemporary social, economic, and political state agendas define representations of the teacher in gendered ways (Fischman, 2007; Silver, 2007). Connell (2005) describes neoliberal ideology as bringing about not only a masculinization, but also a “gradual recomposition of gender orders” (p. 1804). That recomposition is apparent beyond Argentina, and in complex ways. Silver’s (2007) study of Puerto Rican teachers in the context of neoliberalism found to a certain extent a “remasculinized” (p. 279) image of teachers: a sense that the field was opening to men, and a move away from previous rhetoric of teachers as “professional mom[s]” (p. 275). I interrogate how gender is embedded in the foundational concept of the rational and instrumental actor and decision-making on which neoliberalism is based that potentially recomposes the gender order surrounding teaching. Knowing that neoliberal reforms target the teacher workforce and knowing that occupations undergo an ongoing, interactive process of re-gendering, how does neoliberalism transform the continual gendering process through which the meaning and nature of teaching is resignified by both women and men?

Gendered Policy Enactment

Reforming women and men teachers is the most significant hurdle to opening up a “new” political and economic market. Conceptualizing teaching as gendered takes theorizations of teaching work deeper within a re-regulatory context (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 6). This is an important corrective to global education reform literature. Too often studies have generalized educational change in local spaces without teasing out “how” and “why” globalizing forces affect local education in varied ways.

The intersecting effects of territorializing and boundarying practices cannot be assumed on the basis of generic commentaries about globalization, accounts of travelling education reforms or commentaries on teacher professionalism. Rather, understanding these globalizing effects requires analysis of particular spaces to reveal how the disaggregated effects of travelling reform, historical context and patterns of boundarying play out in specific places. (p. 14)

Gender, I suggest, is a useful analytic concept for understanding how policies work. Policy is not neutral or natural; gender mediates policies of detracking (Datnow, 1998), school choice (André Bechely, 2005; Stambach & David, 2005), school management (Chan, 2004), and leadership (Sachs & Blackmore, 2007).

Feminist educational policy analysis suggests that policies, like workers and organizations, are gendered (Marshall, 1999; Rhoten, 2000; Stambach & David, 2005). Stambach and David, (2005) call our attention to educational policies’ connection to institutional histories in which persons are differently situated in power relations. They point out, for example, that mothers and fathers have “different histories of engagement within families and public education” (p. 1637). They examine how school choice policies conceptualize “mothers,” “fathers,” and “parents.” Similarly, I examine how neoliberal education reforms conceptualize teachers in relation to “histories of engagement” with schools, with work, and with the state.

As Datnow (1998) has shown, teachers read policies from within the gendered hierarchies of schools. However, this study enhances hers because teachers read policies as well as the lack of policies and provisions, and act according to gendered institutional roles to fill that policy gap. Chapter 5, for example, details how teachers enact one policy (scholarships) and fight for another one (school snacks). Teachers do not just “receive” policies to implement and then negotiate their meaning on the ground (e.g., Lipsky 1980/2010; Weatherly & Lipsky 1977); they go after them in order to educate, and they do so enacting masculine and feminine roles and responsibilities surrounding food as part of their education work.

Research also tends to personify policy, as if policy on paper (rather than people writing it or deciding how to enforce and do policy) is what gets the proverbial job done. Yet it is men and women enmeshed in struggles for limited material and symbolic resources in contexts of inequality that produce (and contest and resist) educational change. Gender policy analysis acknowledges the integral role masculinities and femininities play in organizational change, from policy creation to implementation. Finally, educational research often treats policy as a linear two-step function and focuses analysis on the outcome, rather than on the process. However, so much transpires between crafting policy language, interpretation, and production. How policies work is not linear and not static; rather, they change with the actors involved in the contexts where they are doing policy. Street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) exercise discretion in the process of reconfiguring boundaries around their work and professional identities (Watkins-Hayes, 2009). As public, front-line workers, they exercise agency “in the spaces between and the ambiguities within rules and systems to serve” the public (Rowe, 2012, p. 2). Teachers’ negotiations of policy demands thus reveal “kinds of ‘boundary work’ that enable/disable professionalising projects” (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 4).

Neoliberal education reform has brought about complexly gendered realities for teachers, unleashed on an unequal social, political, and economic terrain. “Neoliberalism is in principle gender neutral. The ‘individual’ has no gender, and the market delivers advantage to the smartest entrepreneur, not to men or women as such” (Connell, 2005, p. 1815). Yet women and men live and teach in contexts of social and cultural inequality. They make decisions and negotiate professional boundaries based on their own limited and finite material and symbolic resources from their location in the policy context.

Accountability and Control

Steiner-Khamsi, Silova, and Johnson (2006) found care work linked to measures to hold teachers accountable for improving the quality of education. For example, Mongolian teachers could be rewarded or punished through salary bonuses if not punishing children’s behavior, keeping the classroom clean, or keeping the children clean (p. 230). This system of accountability elicited fear, anger, negative responses, and stress amongst teachers. By creating tighter control linked to r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to Global and Local Interest in Reorganizing Teachers’ Work: Comparg Stories
• 1 Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments
• 2 How We Get Work: Gendering Teacher Preparation, Licensure, and the Job of Getting a Job
• 3 Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures in a Meaningless Reform
• 4 Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses
• 5 Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society
• 6 Conclusions and New Beginnings: Teachers as Policy Protagonists
• Index