Teacher Dissent in a City of Market Reform: The Multiple Meanings of Activism

• In Event: How Grassroots Activism Can Challenge Marketization of Schools

Abstract

This paper explores distinctions in teacher activism in the context of Denver Public Schools (DPS), a gentrifying urban district that has enacted market-based education reform, including school choice, charter schools, and merit-based pay and evaluation. In particular, we explore the multiple meanings of participation in Denver’s teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019, in terms of whether or how activism was shaped by the changing context and marketization of the city’s schools, and how marketization shaped teacher professional identities and the nature of activism altogether. While DPS teachers enacted highly visible forms of protest, we consider the conditions and multiple meanings of protest and its implications, including whether rising housing costs shaped teacher dissatisfaction with pay, whether new forms of activism (e.g., social justice unionism) shaped critiques of marketization, as well as the meaning of less visible, private, and muted forms of protest on the part of non-participating teachers in the strike. In doing so, we consider whether activism should be understood in new ways in light of the context and reorganization of public schools wherein teachers’ professional identities and work experiences have increasingly diverged.

Broadly, DPS has embraced a decentralized approach to school management, encompassing a portfolio of choices (district, innovation, and charter schools). With this approach, school leaders are granted waivers from state and district regulations, including collective bargaining agreements with teacher unions. As such, business models of management and staffing have grown, including alternative teacher labor markets and salary incentives, teacher evaluation, and the opening and closing of schools based on student test-score outcomes. In this backdrop, we examine whether and how marketization of public schools amplified and/or impeded grassroots activism in years leading up to and including teacher strikes.

The methods for this study use interviews with 50 teachers, including teachers who participated in dominant forms of activism (walkouts, rallies, and strikes), and interviews with teachers who did not participate in dominant forms of activism. Supplementary data include discourse analysis of school board meetings, collective bargaining meetings, and online postings by teacher groups, and document analysis of school and district memos, flyers, and union contracts. Data analysis is guided by a critical race policy framework which considers the implications of race and power embedded in market policies and new management models. Our analysis began with a system of descriptive and inductive coding (Saldaña, 2009) and a matrix of respondent views in order to identify patterns of convergence and difference across interviews.

Preliminary data suggests that while some teachers embraced social justice unionism (McAlevey, 2016) and viewed themselves as part of an expansive coalition for social change, other teachers described ideas of “new professionalism” (Anderson & Cohen, 2015), where teachers reject collective forms of association and contestation in favor of professional identities premised on individual competition and performance. The school’s leadership and neighborhood context, however, shaped the extent to which teachers embraced and enacted various forms of dissent. Our findings have implications for the future of work and labor organizing.

Authors

• Terrenda Corisa White, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Erin R Kurtz, University of Colorado - Boulder