Teaching Under Pressure: When High Stakes Policy Meets Classroom Reality

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10. Learning and Teaching in Contentious Times

Abstract

In the wake of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the subsequent Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), teachers, schools, and districts have been under tremendous pressure to raise student performance. In many schools labeled ‘low performing’ this has resulted in reduced teacher autonomy and the enforcement of strict adherence to formal district-level policy and the implementation of interventions and strategies intended to boost test scores. But what happens when those policies and interventions reach the classroom? This paper examines the classroom-level pressures that shape teaching practices in low-income elementary schools. Using data from a year-long ethnography of four fourth-grade classrooms across two low-income elementary schools, I investigate the processes through which classroom-level pressures shape teaching experiences in consequential ways. Inhabiting institutionalism and intersectional theory provide a key lens for examining how classroom-level pressures – arising through everyday classroom moments and interactions – add an additional level of stress to pressure-cooker classrooms. Classroom-level pressures compound with district- and school-level pressures, impacting teachers’ capacities to meet student needs. I develop the concept of collective bandwidth as means for understanding how the amalgamation of student characteristics and situational and relational context operate as a separate pressure mechanism operating within classrooms. Findings demonstrate how a classroom’s collective bandwidth shapes classroom interactions in ways that do not always mesh with district-mandated interventions, sometimes worsening the very inequality they are designed to combat. This research contributes to sociological theory by (1) completing the third (bottom) level of pressure in the classroom pressure cooker process model; and (2) introducing the concept of collective-bandwidth as a bottom-level mechanism of teaching pressure.

Author

• Suzanne Wood, University of Notre Dame