Market, Management, Profession: Continuity and Change in Popular Discourse About Teachers, 1990–2019

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Teachers as Education Change Makers: What Empowers and/or Enervates Them (Table 8)

Abstract

Although teachers have been the focus of numerous policy debates in recent decades, we know relatively little about the underlying logics that animate these debates and whether and how they have shifted over time. In this study, I examine the logics that have dominated popular discourse about teachers between 1990 and 2019. I draw on a large corpus of texts from newspapers, magazines, and transcripts of TV news programs, and examine changes in the words closely associated with the word “teacher” in those texts. I find that the professional logic dominated the market and managerial logics in popular discourse about teachers across this period, although the gap between the logics has narrowed since 2010.

Author

• Matthew Shirrell, The George Washington University