'The Art of Education is Dead:' A Mixed-Methods Study of Public-School Teachers' Dignity at Work during North Carolina's Neoliberal Shif

Debate about the purpose of public schools in the U.S is omnipresent. Reformers, academics, and politicians debate which values schools should instill, who is best suited to teach students, ideal learning outcomes, and the most effective way to measure successful teaching and learning. The tensions have resulted in several eras of education reform, each critical of the current set of public-school teachers. The current reform paradigm argues for a neoliberal shift of education in the United States, contending that free market forces are the best way to fix what reformers view as a "broken" education system. Federal programs, including No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RttT), opened the education "market," first to accreditation, examination, and curriculum companies and then to private companies running charter schools in direct competition with their public predecessors. North Carolina (NC) became a frontrunner state in the current, neoliberal education shift after the 2013 legislative session, during which the state removed teacher tenure and moved millions in funding away from public to charter schools through an enlarged voucher program.;Most research into how this neoliberalist shift shapes schools focuses on student outcomes. Sociologists recently called on the field to study how neoliberal changes to education also change teachers' jobs (see Connell 2013; Renzulli 2014). While education reformers often point to the possibility for higher salaries, new chances for promotion, and even more enthusiastic students and colleagues, sociologists fear that neoliberal changes to public schools will undermine teachers' ability to achieve dignity at work, and in turn, the long-term health of the education field. Neoliberal reforms heavily focus on the actual labor of teaching as legislation and new education programs embrace the neotayloristic assumptions and tactics deeply embedded in many of the free market business tactics they are adopting. This focus on labor has major implications for the 3.1 million people who work in U.S. public schools.;In this project, I use mixed-methods data collected from two-hundred and twenty-three public-school faculty in one NC Learning Education Agency (LEA) between 2012 and 2015 to assess how this neoliberal shift to North Carolina's public education shaped teachers' ability to attain dignity in their jobs. Analysis using grounded theory methods reveals that NC's neoliberal shift undermines the structure of public schools as workplaces that allow teachers to attain dignity at work. Public-school teachers and administrators consistently reported that the way they used to teach and want to teach -- the "art of teaching" -- was not possible, if not entirely "dead," in the current underfunded and chaotic education climate.;As teachers worked to safeguard their dignity some formed in-groups to effectively hoard resources from other groups of teachers in the school. This relational protection practice produced inequality within their schools. However, these effects were more pronounced among schools with limited resources and high levels of organizational chaos. Two organizational factors influenced whether or not teachers engaged in hoarding practices: (1) additional resources, and (2) effective management. But, neither of these conditions was sufficient. Teachers needed to work in schools led by a principal who had access to additional funding and used these resources to achieve their vision for success. Undermining public-school teachers' conditions for attaining dignity at work has negative consequences for the health of the teacher labor force and student outcomes, suggesting the need for alternatives to the neoliberal reforms currently taking place in North Carolina and around the United States.