Fear and Loathing in Wisconsin: Teaching in a De-Unionized State

• In Event: 65.074 - Policy to Practice and Back Again: How Policy Influences Teachers and Teachers Influence Policy

Abstract

In 2011, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker unveiled a proposal to cut the state budget that included a non-negotiable provision restricting collective bargaining rights for public sector unions and eliminating automatic payroll deduction for union dues. After the Budget Repair Bill was passed amidst much protest and controversy, it became known as Act 10. Many school boards used their new authority to abandon collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) and issue official district handbooks, altering teachers’ work lives and school power dynamics (Authors, 2013). This paper seeks to understand what changes have been made to teachers’ terms of employment, why, and how teachers negotiate this policy change.
Our theoretical framework uses Weick’s (1995) notions of “sense-making”, how people take up new information within pre-existing frames of reference formulated by past experience and social contexts (Coburn, 2001; Spillane et al., 2002). We also focused on “the narrativization of real events” (White, 1989), how teachers story their memories – in this case, of the protests and the passage of the legislation. We selected districts of different sizes and political leanings from across the state (n=18), then emailed social studies teachers at randomly selected secondary schools within those districts to invite them to participate in interviews about their experiences teaching before, during, and after Act 10. We transcribed and analyzed a set of twenty-five, hour-long semi-structured interviews (Fontana & Frey, 2003) rooted in critical incident scaffolding (Corbally, 1956). Secondly, we compared the CBAs and handbooks for each of the teacher’s districts and cross-analyzed those findings with the emergent interview themes.
In short, we found that while Act 10 dramatically re-shaped teachers’ employment context in a variety of ways, not all felt the impact of that legislation equally depending on their district’s economics and school board politics as well as their gender/marital status. Teachers in districts that were more economically stable/more affluent with less ideologically conservative school board members reported less intense experiences, as did single men. Those districts also had less significant changes between CBAs and handbooks. Conversely, teachers in districts that were less economically stable/lower income and with more ideologically conservative school board members reported enormous stress, as did married teachers and women. Their districts also had more significant changes between CBAs and handbooks. Even among those teachers who do not mourn the death of collective bargaining, or those teachers whose districts protected them from the worst effects of Act 10, there is a consistent sense of being loathed by the community at large and a palpable fear about their future as teachers.
The political drama in Wisconsin provides a powerful case through which to better understand how teachers’ work lives and professional decisions are being impacted by neoliberal educational policy reforms. This paper contributes to the small body of research addressing the nature of teacher vulnerability in relation to the contexts of school reform (Kelchtermans, 1996, 2005; Lasky, 2005; Nias, 1999) and expands our nascent understanding of which factors (both individual and community) mediate teachers’ sense-making of and experiences with policy.

Authors

• Katy Swalwell, Iowa State University

• Simone Schweber, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Kristin Sinclair, University of Maryland - College Park