Making Civics: Teacher Discretion and Political Agency in Civic Education Policy Implementation

• In Event: Democracy and Democratization: Ideals of Change in Education

Abstract

Purpose
Teachers are street-level bureaucrats (e.g., Lipsky, 2010; Zacka, 2018) who exert considerable discretion in classrooms, where their politics inform education policy implementation. Faced with a plethora of decisions about content and pedagogy, teachers are educators and policymakers whose discretion makes the policies written by political elites.
The discretion of civic educators impacts young people within and beyond the classroom in ways that can promote, or hinder, democratic life. Teachers are political actors (e.g., Mirra & Garcia, 2023). This conceptual paper develops a categorization tool of teachers as political agents (TPAs) that captures an interaction between teacher partisanship, level of political interest and engagement, political schooling climate at both the local and national level, and pedagogical and curricular decisions.
Framework
Street-level bureaucrats interact with the public through the provision of public services (Hupe & Buffat, 2014; Lipsky, 2010). Despite a basic principle that implementation – classroom teaching – should be apolitical and uniform (Stensöta, 2012; Wilson, 1887), this final stage of the policy process is rarely apolitical (Hupe & Hill, 2016; Mirra & Garcia, 2023). I bring the literature on street-level bureaucrats to the classroom and critique the view that teachers can be neutral by categorizing the ways in which they are political.
Analytical Approach
This conceptual paper relies on data from 23 in-depth interviews with civics teachers and three months of fieldwork in a large northeastern urban public school district. I ground this empirical and conceptual work in public administration and education policy scholarship highlighting the inherently political role of teachers as street-level bureaucrats. This is particularly poignant in a moment where the culture wars have returned to the battleground of public education.

Findings
Emergent findings reveal four broad categories of teachers as political agents (TPAs) in determining what (content) and how (pedagogy) to teach political content. These categories represent an interaction between teacher partisan persuasion, level of political interest and engagement, political schooling climate at both the local and national level, and their pedagogical and curricular decisions.

Significance
Despite calls for neutral or apolitical education (e.g., Hess & McAvoy, 2015; Journell, 2016; Mirra & Garcia, 2023), the nature of teachers as front-line policy implementers renders their work political. It is a democratic imperative to honestly examine how and under what conditions they are political to inform teacher practice, training, and curriculum policy that embraces teachers for their discretionary power while also holding them accountable to students, families, and society.
For civic educators, this has implications for classroom learning as well as the development of political knowledge, skills, and dispositions young people will carry with them into their lives as (dis)engaged citizens. Teacher discretion therefore has a sizable influence on the political socialization of students, and researchers should understand them as political agents, an endeavor supported by the development of this categorization tool.

Author

• Abigail Dym, Providence College