Banking on ignorance: A spatial inquiry into the truncated politics of charter school teachers

Abstract

Over the past 30 years in the US, the teaching profession has been radically transformed as publicly-funded, but privately managed charter schools have created a workforce of less experienced, less unionized, less credentialed and more transient educators. This paper argues that a primary effect of these labour practices is to reduce the charter school project’s ideological exposure. Charter school teachers are recruited from a national pool and for transient positions. They are disconnected from the low-income and racialized places where they are brought to teach and, on the job, face speed-up, heavy-handed management, deskilling and job insecurity. Charter school teachers in this study are not, as previous research has argued, cheerleaders for the privatization of education, let alone the virtues of flexible, non-union work. Rather, they express frustration that their work conditions are degraded. But unlike their counterparts in traditional public schools, who are more anchored in the politics of place and education, charter school teachers are unfamiliar with the policy changes that have brought them to the current moment. The neo-Taylorist labour practices of charter schools make it difficult for teachers to analyse or parse the power dynamics of which they are a part as subjects if not victims. The study makes a case that the working conditions and workforce composition of frontline workers are key to understanding how these workers engage in battles over welfare provision in the neoliberal city.