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From pressure to "teach to the test" and the use of quantitative metrics to define education "quality," to the rise of "school choice" and the shift of principals from colleagues to managers, teachers in New York, Mexico City, and Toronto have experienced strikingly similar challenges to their professional autonomy. By visiting schools and meeting teachers, government officials, and union leaders, Paul Bocking identifies commonalities that are shaping how teachers work and public schools function.
While arguing that neoliberal education policy is a dominant trend transcending the realities of school districts, states, or national governments, Bocking also demonstrates the importance of local context to explain variations in education governance, especially when understanding the role of resistance led by teachers’ unions.
List of contents
Preface 1. Introduction
1.1 What Is Teachers’ Professional Autonomy? Why Is It Important for Public Education?
1.2 Key Dimensions for Assessing Challenges to Professional Autonomy
1.3 A Geography of Teachers’ Professional Autonomy
1.4 Challenging Professional Autonomy
1.5 Methodology
1.6 Book Overview
2. Geographies of Professional Autonomy and Neoliberalism in North America
Preface: Dia Del Trabajo
2.1 The Emergence of Public Education, Teachers’ Unions, and Professionalism
2.2 The Postwar Consolidation of Public Education Systems and Teachers’ Unions
2.3 The Neoliberalization of Education: Teacher Unionism on the Defensive
2.4 Transnational Elite Policy
2.5 Counter Hegemonic Continental Networks
3. New York City
Preface: Visiting a Small High School on the Upper West Side
3.1 Structural Changes I: Centralizing Power to Facilitate Neoliberal Fast Policy
3.2 Structural Changes II: Transforming Workplace Culture
3.3 Teacher Precariousness and the Weakening of the School Site Union and Professional Autonomy
3.4 Scaling Up: Initiative in Neoliberal Policy Shifts from NYC to Albany
3.5 Cuomo’s Expansion of Standardized Testing into Teacher Evaluation: Undermining Professional Autonomy
3.6 State of Our Union, State of Our Schools
4. Mexico City
Preface: Teachers’ Day
4.1 Transitions in State Power, Decentralization, and Emergence of Elba Esther Gordillo’s SNTE as a Key Neoliberal Actor
4.2 Re-Centralized Governance through School-Based Competition
4.3 From Clientelism to a Neoliberalized Teaching Profession
4.4 Enrique Peña Nieto and Fast Policy
4.5 What Makes a Teacher? Marginalizing the Normals and Teacher Education
4.6 Testing Teachers
4.7 Precarious Employment and Professional Autonomy
4.8 Acquiescence, Resistance, and the Challenges of Scaling Up: The CNTE in the City and the Countryside
5. Toronto
Preface: School Workroom Cultures
5.1 Centralizing Governance: Increasing Ontario Ministry of Education Control of the Toronto District School Board
5.2 Quantifying Student Achievement: Policy from the Centre
5.3 Quantifying Student Achievement: Impact on the Classroom and Professional Autonomy
5.4 Quantifying Student Achievement: Intersection of Race, Class, and School Choice on Teachers’ Work
5.5 Scaling Up: The Centralization of Bargaining and the Negotiation of Professional Autonomy
6. Conclusion
Preface: Confronting the Neoliberalization of Education
6.1 The Centrality of Teachers’ Professional Autonomy in the Struggle Against the Neoliberalization of Education
6.2 Teachers’ Unions as Champions of Professional Autonomy
6.3 A Multi Scalar Geography of Teachers’ Professional Autonomy
Appendix: List of Interviews
Bibliography
About the author
Paul Bocking recently earned his PhD in geography from York University and is a sessional lecturer in the School of Labour Studies at McMaster University.
Summary
In recent years, schools across North America, serving vastly distinct communities, have been subject to strikingly similar waves of neoliberal policies by governments that are reshaping the nature of teachers’ work.
