Teachers’ Newest Punishment: Using Foucault’s Discipline Theory to Construct New Meaning of Merit Pay’s Implications

• In Event: Roundtable Session 65
  In Roundtable Session: Applying Foucault to Qualitative Inquiry in Education: Looking at Resistance as Opportunity for New Knowledge

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how students’ and teachers’ souls are punished by the pressure of a standardized testing environment and an emphasis on numerical performance above all else. The most severe teacher discipline and punishment – “merit pay” -- looms in state legislatures after trickling down from the Obama Administration’s call for states to enter its Race to the Top Challenge. While plans by state vary, “merit pay” generally equates to paying teachers a salary that would fluctuate with how well students perform on standardized tests. Education policymakers borrow the idea largely from the corporate world, where higher sales or performance on the job equates to “bonuses” or a higher salary.
Politicians and other merit-pay supporters clearly want to reform the system and change teachers. With each new standardized test, over which teachers have no control in creation or implementation, educators and students lose autonomy and become objects of discipline in the quest for knowledge. Foucault (1975/1995) chronicled how, for centuries, societies have aimed to create passive or “docile” bodies, so that they could be subjected to rule and made to follow the law, out of fear for what would happen. Foucault wrote “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (p. 136). In education now, many argue we’ve reached a critical point, and we could realize this decades later as a newer theory of law, where test scores rule all. Foucault (1975/1995) asserted “punishment is also a way of exacting retribution that is both personal and public” (p. 48). Merit pay would act similarly as a punishment for teachers who do not perform to standard.
Foucault (1975/1995) also argued, “power produces knowledge.” (p. 27). Using his Theory of Discipline to examine merit pay in qualitative inquiry allows both educators and policymakers the opportunity to see this controversial education issue in a different light and perhaps may spark new discourse. The value in such an exercise is that politicians have the power to shape the public agenda. Lawmakers vote according to what they perceive their constituents want, and currently, the discourse surrounding merit pay has been dominated by the buzzword, accountability. They determine, in talking to constituents, that accountability matters, so they support merit pay as responsible and ethical practice. Foucault’s theory provides new perspective to that conversation.
New meaning constructed from qualitative inquiry using Foucault’s Theory of Discipline in analysis brings to the table new understanding of the term merit pay. In a 29-page policy paper released in August by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (Baker, et. al, 2010), the authors of the paper found “little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains” (p. 3). The authors cited punishment of teachers as an aim of the merit-pay proposals. Now, those who adopt this thinking face the challenge of proving this to the public.

Author

• Kevin Schneider, University of Georgia