The education reform agenda creates an impossible paradigm to realize true social progress and the preservation of democratic ideals. An accountability and compliance monitoring culture has also created an oppressive bureaucracy for schools and educators. The reform principles narrowly framed in business and market values elevate efficacy, utility, competition, individualism, and exceptionalism above public values of social progress for all. Under the guise of numerically measurable progress, we have seen diminishing resources and the erosion of values of learning necessary for purposeful social change.

In the meantime, schools are asked to mitigate the social problems as they individually manifest in students rather than include the study of structural problems of inequity, race relations, class, and power that characterize our society. This is an extension of a long-term American effort to deflect social problems onto public schools, asking them to solve problems that we are not willing to solve through the political process – even though schools are ill-equipped for such a mission. It is a process of taking problems that emerge from the extreme inequalities embedded in American social structure and turning these structural problems into individual problems in the mental health of students. Instead of fixing the structures that afflict students, we ask them to toughen up, get resilient, learn grit, and learn to soldier their way through life, taking personal responsibility for what ails them while simultaneously asking schools to develop and implement the strategies required to realize the mission. This behavioral training has become the new mantra for school curricula and programming.

There is a long line of literature that recognizes the swindle of an education reform movement framed in standardization and an accountability bureaucracy and yet has failed to recognize how this disinvestment of the state has transformed the role of the school and school administrators (Aronowitz, 2008; Berliner & Glass, 2014; Carter & Welner, 2013; Giroux, 2011; Labaree, 2012; Means, 2013; Robinson, 2014; Saltman, 2014). The reform agendas have been aimed at implementing modifications to teaching and school practices that purposefully compensate for adverse structural conditions. Massachusetts, a state considered a leader in education reform, has a long history of launching standardization and accountability policies through legislation that holds schools, teachers, administrators, and communities responsible for student achievement scores on standardized tests and graduation rates. Recently, the education reform narrative has broadly extended the accountability culture into the realm of student behavioral health, significantly transforming the role of schools and school administrators. Instead of critically examining the socio-economic structural conditions that impact student achievement, specific to emotional health, the reform agenda has normalized the educationalization of emotional/behavioral health as the answer to poor, stagnant, or declining student achievement test scores, achievement gaps, and low graduation rates.

“At the turn of the twenty-first century our collective sense of well-being has never been more precarious” (Aronowitz, 2008, p. ix). The haunting middle-class fear of falling into poverty elevates the value of schooling credentials such as a diploma, high grade point averages (GPA), certificates, and degrees that link schooling to increased economic security. This is the era of education reform that privileges the attainment of job ready vocational skills over any other educational values, transforming educators from intellectuals into technicians, devoid of creativity, autonomy, and passion for providing an education for a better world. “The traditional assumption that schooling is fundamentally tied to the imperatives of citizenship designed to educate students to exercise civic leadership and public service has been eroded” (Giroux, 2011, p. ix). Educators are stripped of the immense sense of responsibility for contributing to the development of a generation empowered by their education, able to disrupt oppression, poverty, disease, and intolerance (Aronowitz, 2008). In this narrative, the educator as oppositional intellectual and the student as change agent have become part of our history rather than our mission.

Massachusetts education reform has positioned the responsibility of social-emotional/behavioral health of students onto schools through a neoliberal political and economic agenda. The research here will make visible the increasing roles and responsibilities that schools have assumed for students living in poverty, homeless students, students as victims of trauma, students living in a fragile situation of domestic violence, alcohol/drug abuse, or poor mental health. The principal investigator will lay the foundation for the need for an alternative paradigm to support student behavioral health as a public good and a civil right. This cannot be accomplished by schools alone and will require educational leaders to serve as protective agents and political activists to disrupt the current landscape to rewrite the narrative of education reform and emotional health.

Just as the question of what educators teach cannot be separated from the knowledge they produce, the ideologies they bestow, and the social relations they legitimate (Giroux, 2011), school administrators must locate themselves and their voice within their own knowledges, ideologies, and social relations. Subjectivity and social location matter. Identifying my own political and social location and the experience of the subject provides authenticity and understanding to the work undertaken for this project. My own individual and generational, political, social, and intellectual history offers the context to which my truth is interpreted in the work that follows (Fraser, 1989).

As I close in on 32 years in public education as a classroom teacher and high school administrator, this research project and the engagement in the educational leadership doctoral program framed in social justice have empowered me in a significant way. I came to the classroom as a 23-year-old, local college graduate, from a working-class family of four. My parents were high school sweethearts and attended the same local public schools that my brother and I attended. Both of my parents worked full-time in order to provide a rich life for their family. Richness for our family meant a single-family home in a small town, middle-class neighborhood, with an in-ground pool and a diving board to die for, televisions in every room, the first of the Commodore computers and toys and clothes that made positive relationships with friends and family an easy endeavor.

Attending school on time and daily was an understood expectation. After school I spent the afternoons playing in the neighborhood until my father whistled for dinner. After dinner, I did homework, watched TV with my family, and played Atari, cards, or board games with my brother. The bus stop was never more than a few hundred yards away. I remember when the town made cuts to the school budget, and bus transportation for my brother and me was in jeopardy. My parents attended the School Committee meetings and advocated for our transportation based on safety, equity, and need. Not having bus transportation would have been a significant hardship, particularly in the afternoons when both parents would be working. At the time, I was oblivious to the cultural capital I was born into, provided, and enjoyed. I never had to think about transportation to school. I just assumed it would always be provided.

Weekends and vacations were characterized by two or three trips to Disney World, rental cottages and hotels on Cape Cod and New Hampshire, occasional Patriots and Red Sox games, and always, always…Sunday dinner with my mother’s extended Italian family. Holidays were robust! Most often they were celebrated over two days with lots of food, wine, singing, dancing, and weather-dependent multi-generational softball or football games at my grandparents’ home. One of my most endearing childhood traditions was the weekly visit of my maternal grandfather. He was a larger-than-life Italian business man with an affectionate demeanor for his grandchildren and an understood expectation of behavior for all in his presence. His visits came every Sunday morning (bearing chocolate bars for my brother and me) after he attended church where he sung in the choir. My mother would serve coffee and breakfast while the family of four engaged in meaningful conversations with the wise patriarch, absorbing and contributing to my own knowledge-making at a very young age. The family structure, the neighborhood culture, and the routines of a provisioned youth, provided a strong sense of security, unlike the precarity that youth are experiencing in the individualized context of society today.

Reflecting on my own childhood experience is as valuable as reflecting on my adult, educational, parenting, and vocational formative experiences that shape and situate the lens in which I view the world, and thus, positions the sociological aspect of my research interests and understandings. When I entered the high school classroom as a 23-year-old history teacher in a small Massachusetts community similar to my own, it was 1985. The draw to a career in education was dismal, and for the passionate few, a precarious path. I was one of a handful of secondary education minors to graduate from Bridgewater State University in 1984. The “back to basics” movement was in full swing, driven by the recently released A Nation at Risk . School funding in Massachusetts had also just taken a huge hit with the passing of Proposition 2 ½, implemented in 1982, which put a limit on annual increases in property taxes, significantly impacting school budgets. Teaching itself became a precarious profession.

As a young teacher, I quickly experienced what I referred to as culture shock. I was assigned to teach five classes of an average of 28 students per class. All of my classes were assigned the lowest academic level designation: typical rookie assignment. I had absolutely no idea that high school students were unable to read, write, and comprehend at what I deemed an average competency. I also had very little knowledge of the diverse socio-economic conditions that my students lived in and/or how those conditions impacted their learning. I was not ignorant of poverty, racism, violence, substance use, neglect, child abuse, and trauma; only that for me, it happened somewhere else. Suddenly it was right in front of me. Suddenly it mattered to ME.

Educators are preordained to impact future generations, to shape and contribute to humanity—aren’t we? However, it wasn’t really until I became an administrator that I truly understood how vital the role and responsibilities of schools and educators is in order to overcome the social, political, and economic conditions that impede student learning. As an administrator, I now sat at bigger tables with greater impact, where the power and weight of my voice and vision seemed to carry greater responsibilities. It is these formative subjective experiences—fro...