| Most of our hopes and dreams for public education rely on how well teachers teach, and major federal education policies often need teachers to serve as their primary implementers. Yet we know very little about how teachers' responses to federal education policies affect their teaching, their identity and their motivations. Research on "policy feedback" recognizes that policy targets derive important lessons from public policies and political discourse, but there are gaps in terms of how, when and why relationships within organizations, institutions, or communities mediate these effects on policy implementers and citizens. This dissertation uses cultural policy analysis, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with teachers, to examine how the public framing of policy problems, policy targets, and solutions under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has impacted teachers' political and social experiences, behaviors and identities. The primary goal is to understand the effects of NCLB on teaching, learning, and policy implementation. However, by interviewing teachers from a wide variety of backgrounds and schools, this dissertation also provides insight into how public policies and political discourse interact with teachers' backgrounds, and the racial and socio-economic backgrounds of their students, to mitigate or exacerbate the effects of public policies on children's educational outcomes and the democratic social purposes of schools. The research finds that NCLB has restricted teachers' abilities to form meaningful relationships at work, and thus their ability to fulfill the humanistic norms of teaching as an occupation. It also has shifted authority and power away from teachers and public schools to parents, state bureaucrats, corporate elites and interest groups, who use their authority to influence what is taught by constructing what is tested. Teachers further argued, however, that the construction of parents as "consumers" of education has shifted power toward those parents who are the most vocal. These parents use their social and cultural capital to establish control over how schools are organized so that they may obtain special programs for their children. In the process, NCLB has undermined the social democratic mission of schools, which is part of teachers' ethical commitment to a just society. |
