Abstract
This article traces the work of community-based popular educators with an explicit commitment to “Freirean” popular education as they shifted from teaching in a community-based setting to an after-school program focused on standardized test-preparation. Drawing from ethnographic observation and interviews, it examines educators’ pedagogical practice and the narratives they employed to explain, interpret, and justify their practice. It shows that they adopted a “discourse of both/and,” asserting the possibility and virtues of doing Freirean popular education and high-stakes test preparation simultaneously, without sacrificing the integrity of either. It argues that this discourse was a pragmatic adaptation to structural imperatives but also a limiting one that facilitated the intensification of workload, individual responsibilization, and a shifting of organizational mission in ways that align with neoliberal reform. Drawing from Foucauldian analyses of audit culture, this article troubles the discourse of both/and by exposing how it operates as a technology of neoliberal governance even when cloaked in the language of social justice.
Introduction
Education reform has dramatically reshaped schools and classrooms in the United States in the last two decades. Most controversial among parents and educators has been the introduction of high-stakes tests with punitive consequences for schools and teachers. By now, the arguments on both sides of the high-stakes testing debate are well known by scholars, teachers, parents and much of the public. Proponents frame testing as a neutral tool for measuring educational outcomes. On the other side, critics claim testing is not a neutral measurement tool but an intervention that actively shapes what happens in classrooms—leading to more teacher-centered, skills-based rote forms of teaching and learning (Lipman, 2003; McNeil, 2000; Ravitch, 2010). Educators committed to social justice, in particular, have pointed out paradigmatic and epistemological contradictions between the guiding assumptions of social justice pedagogy and those of test-driven reformers (Nygreen, 2016; Madeloni and Gorlewski, 2013; Sleeter, 2008). Yet, when faced with the reality and hegemony of high-stakes testing, some critical educators adopt an alternative discourse, asserting both the possibility and virtues of doing both—social justice teaching and high-stakes test preparation—simultaneously, without sacrificing the integrity of either. I refer to this as the discourse of both/and. In this article, I explore the emergence of this discourse among a group of community-based popular educators who espoused commitments to “Freirean” pedagogy for social justice (e.g. Freire, 1999) while developing an after-school program aimed at high-stakes test preparation.
The research on which this article is based did not initially set out to examine the issue of high-stakes testing. In fact, I chose to study educators in a community-based organization (CBO) precisely because they worked outside of formal schooling, and thus were relatively “safe” from the influence of testing. My study—a two-year ethnography of a small grassroots organization, Alianza—focused on the use of popular education as an approach to multigenerational educating and organizing for social change. What drew me to Alianza was its public commitment to what leaders within the organization called “popular education methodology”—a theory and practice of education for liberation based on critical consciousness and collective social action (Adams, 1975; Freire, 1999; Horton and Freire, 1990). While many CBOs focus their work on a particular social issue, Alianza defined itself through its popular education methodology, drawing heavily on the influence of Paulo Freire in defining what this meant. Freire’s published works—especially Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1999), which was de facto required reading for staff, board and volunteers—provided Alianza’s popular educators with a shared language, analysis of oppression, and theory of change to guide their practice. Their work was truly grassroots and intensely local, situated in a predominantly Latina/o neighborhood that is home to many immigrant families from Mexico and Central America.
As a scholar with a longtime interest in popular education and critical pedagogy, I was intrigued by Alianza’s work as soon as I heard about it, and came to develop great admiration for its popular educators as I learned more about them. However, my interest in Alianza as a research site was born only when I learned that leaders within the organization were launching a parent organizing campaign to advocate for a parent-led, popular education-based, bilingual pilot school in their neighborhood. This campaign would set the intersection of several research interests—Freire-based critical pedagogy, family engagement, and racial/economic inequality in schools. Alianza’s “outsider” status in the world of education reform—it had no formal affiliation with schools and had not previously been involved in education organizing—made it particularly interesting to me because I hoped to better understand how communities traditionally marginalized within educational systems might achieve greater voice. Reflecting these interests, I developed a community-engaged ethnographic research project with Alianza to both contribute to and help document the parent organizing campaign. Although my research focused primarily on parent workshops and meetings, I also observed their children’s program—which offered free education-based childcare during summer and school vacation weeks—because it was the institutional base for the parent organizing campaign.
My research took an unexpected turn when Alianza’s leadership suspended the parent organizing campaign and converted the children’s program into an after-school program aligned to state standards in partnership with two public schools. This turn of events allowed me to witness how Alianza’s educational work with children shifted as they moved from a CBO context to a school-based context and incorporated an explicit emphasis on standardized test preparation. In this article, I illustrate and theorize about this shift, drawing from observations of the children’s program before and after the partnership with schools, and interviews with Alianza’s teachers. I show that they adopted the discourse of both/and as a strategic response to the imperative to raise standardized test scores, and they wrestled with how to do such teaching without sacrificing the political aims of popular education. I argue that, in Alianza, the discourse of both/and was a pragmatic adaptation to structural circumstances but also a limiting one that enabled and facilitated significant shifts in core aspects of their mission. More broadly, I aim to trouble the discourse of both/and by showing how it operates as a technology of neoliberal governance.
I situate my story of Alianza within the broader context of neoliberalization—a set of political–economic and discursive–ideological processes that have reshaped both public education and nonprofit organizations. As a nonprofit CBO that partnered with schools to do with work of education, Alianza’s story is shaped by the effects of neoliberal restructuring in both education and CBOs. As such, in the first section below, I provide a brief overview of the literature on neoliberalism in education and CBOs, highlighting common themes across them. Next, I describe the context and methods of my study at Alianza. I then present my findings in two parts, corresponding to the two phases of my research: before and after the partnership with schools. I show how teachers employed the discourse of both/and to make sense of and justify their changing pedagogical practice. I focus on two significant shifts in their everyday work during the post-partnership phase: teaching to the test; and chasing data. I interpret these findings as an illustration of neoliberal governmentality, drawing from Foucauldian analyses of audit culture as a technology of governance (Canaan and Shumer, 2011; Foucault, 1991; Shore and Wright, 2000). While recognizing the pragmatic appeal of the discourse of both/and, my purpose in this paper is to trouble it by exposing how it operates as a technology of neoliberal governance even when cloaked in the language of social justice.
Neoliberalizing education and grassroots organizations: an overview
American public education has undergone significant shifts in form, structure, and process as a result of neoliberalization. In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act opened the door to privatization of many educational functions that had previously been the domain of educators’ work (Burch, 2009), and brought about an intense focus on measurement and testing of isolated skills in every grade, which has by now become routine. A new emphasis on collecting data—made possible and necessary by the imposition of mandated high-stakes testing—allowed schools to be easily compared with each other and ranked (Apple, 2006; Burch, 2009). Attaching punitive consequences to these tests for students, teachers, principals and schools is now accepted as commonplace. Research has documented increasing numbers of teachers adapting to these pressures by employing more didactic, teacher-centered pedagogies focused on isolated skills, and dedicating more class time to taking practice tests. Charter schools that explicitly embrace this approach, such as the Knowledge Is Power schools, are held up as models of “success” because evidence suggests they produce higher test scores for high-poverty students of color (Fryer, 2014). Critics of these reforms argue that, among other things, they reduce the space and time available for critical, student-centered, culturally-relevant instruction (Lipman, 2003; McNeil, 2000; Madeloni and Gorlewski, 2013; Sleeter, 2008).
The neoliberal turn in education changed the nature of educators’ work outside the classroom as well. To meet the demands of upward punitive accountability, educators’ work lives—in kindergarten grades 1–12 (K12) as in higher education—are increasingly organized around the production of particular forms of data and performing “rituals of verification” associated with audit culture (Power, 1997; see also Shear and Hyatt, 2015; Shore and Wright, 2000). This produces an intensification of workload and a shift in educators’ labor from the “first-order” work of teaching (including lesson preparation, grading, and working with students and families outside of the classroom) to the “second-order” work of documenting and justifying one’s teaching for the purpose of compliance and audit (Canaan, 2008; Shore and Wright, 2000). Other activities and priorities of educators are squeezed out, receiving less attention and time than those that are measured, counted and scored. For a fraction of the new middle class, these changes opened opportunities to experience upward mobility, increased status, and more power (Apple, 2006). While those who are closest to students—the teachers—have had their labor deskilled and experienced status degradation (e.g. Kumashiro, 2012), professionals such as assessment specialists, data management systems specialists, test-makers and educational entrepreneurs have seen their status and influence increase (Apple, 2006). For these professionals, neoliberal reform has provided subject positions through which to imagine themselves as “doing good” by applying technical skills. This is one of the ways that neoliberal reform works on educators’ professional identities.
In a parallel set of processes, scholars of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have documented a transformation in the purpose, structure and processes of grassroots nonprofits as a result of neoliberal restructuring. Many organizations that had once been locally-based grassroots collectives dedicated to consciousness-raising, community organizing and movement-building have evolved into professional bureaucratic organizations dedicated to service-delivery or policy advocacy (Alvarez, 1998; Markowitz and Tice, 2002). In the process, the institutional identities of many such organizations shifted from adversary to partner of the state, especially as some accepted subcontracts to deliver social services that had once been seen as the responsibility of the state. The need for continuous fundraising and the production of data to justify such funds occupied a greater proportion of staff time; as such, staff members with the credentials and technical skills needed to perform such labor experienced increased power and status, leading to the professionalization of grassroots organizations (Markowitz and Tice, 2002). Critics from within and outside grassroots organizations argued that they were becoming more accountable to donors (or states) than to the communities they supposedly represented (Alvarez, 1998). Moreover, in assuming social welfare functions that should properly be the role of the state, NGOs facilitated the disinvestment of public institutions and the privatization of the public sphere (Alvarez, 1998; Kamat, 2004; Miraftab, 2004).
While recognizing that neoliberalization operates in distinct ways in different institutional (and national) contexts, it is instructive to consider the similar effects of neoliberal restructuring in education and CBOs within the US and globally. Some of the common themes across these literatures include: the increasing reliance on private (rather than public) sources of funds; the intensification of workload; the increasing prevalence of second-order rather than first-order labor; and an emphasis on collecting particular kinds of data to continuously justify one’s existence to funders and/or the state. Many of these effects can be grouped under the heading of “audit culture” (Strathern, 2000), or the application of financial accounting procedures and logics to other areas of social life, especially to public institutions. The rise of audit culture across public and nonprofit sectors has been so pervasive, so thorough, and so thoroughly naturalized that Strathern describes it as having “all the momentum of a cultural movement” (Strathern, 2000: 4). Critical ethnographies have revealed how this movement works on our professional identities—producing new forms of subjectivity as we adapt to and internalize the new norms of coercive accountability, austerity and competition (Biesta, 2004; Shear and Hyatt, 2015; Shore and Wright, 2000; Uzwiak, 2013). In educational institutions as well as nonprofit organizations, workplaces have become more internally stratified and competitive as individuals within them are positioned as competitors with each other (Markowitz and Tice, 2002; Shore and Wright, 2000), and the organizations themselves (schools, universities, academic departments, etc.) are forced to compete with others like them through a constant process of evaluation and ranking (Biesta, 2004; Shore and Wright, 2000). As Shore and Wright argue: “Audit works by ranking individuals and institutions against each other” (Shore and Wright, 2000: 61); it is a technology that functions to “engineer competition and a climate of insecurity” (Shore and Wright, 2000: 78).
Audit culture and the coercive accountability practices that constitute it are intricately connected to, and function to uphold and strengthen, neoliberal political–economic policies and logics (Shore and Wright, 2000). As such, audit culture can be thought of as a technology of neoliberal governance. Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality offers a useful frame for seeing this (Foucault, 1991; Gordon, 1991): rather than viewing government as the institutions of the state, Foucault defines government as processes that order individual actions. Neoliberal governmentality is a way to describe the processes through which individuals are brought into line, so to speak—to carry out the roles and functions of the neoliberal state, or support them, but seemingly of our own accord, without the need for visible coercion. Neoliberal governmentality functions in part through the internalization of new norms and the taking on of new actions and practices in the mundane, day-to-day, seemingly innocuous activities of our lives and work. For Foucault, this notion of government does not deny individual agency; in fact, it works through agency. As Gordon (1991: 5) paraphrases: “power is only power (rather than mere physical force or violence) when addressed to individuals who are free to act in one way or another. Power is defined as ‘actions on others’ actions’: that is, it presupposes rather than annuls their capacity as agents; it acts upon, and through, an open set of practical and ethical possibilities.” Governmentality, then, is a term that conveys how state power operates at a distance, while obscuring its own operation. Applying this concept to audit culture in higher education, Shore and Wright (2000: 62) argue, “Audit thus becomes a political technology of the self: a means through which individuals actively and freely regulate their own conduct and thereby contribute to the government’s model of social order.”
As a grassroots organization that partnered with public schools, Alianza’s work was informed, shaped, and constrained by neoliberalizing processes in education as well as CBOs. As we will see, audit culture in both education and CBOs shaped and constrained Alianza’s work and help to explain why the story took the turns it did. To further situate this story of Alianza, I now turn to a description of the research context and methods.
Research context and methods
Alianza is a small grassroots CBO located in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of a large, multi-ethnic major city on the West Coast. I first learned about Alianza from the director of its children’s program, Lidia. I am a White, native-born US citizen and university professor of education, and I knew Lidia through organizing work related to immigrant rights and undocumented student access. Lidia was a recent college graduate who had volunteered at Alianza and later became the director of its children’s program, which offered free education-based childcare to elementary aged children during summer and school vacation weeks. The children’s program was housed in the basement of an ally nonprofit organization—a large open space divided into sections with rolling bulletin boards. Participating families were mostly, if not exclusively, migrants from Latin American countries, and most were Spanish-dominant or monolingual Spanish speakers. All of the families lived in the immediate surrounding neighborhood—one of the poorest in the city—and arrived to the program on foot.
The children’s program served as the institutional base for parent-education workshops, which were offered periodically on a range of topics—from immigration reform and “know your rights” trainings to arts and crafts, parenting strategies, and healthy eating. Alianza also offered a series of six, four-hour Saturday workshops on educational justice; these trained parents to both navigate the educational system and advocate for their children. Parents were informed about and encouraged to attend workshops during drop-off and pick-up times, both verbally and through written communication, as well as through regular telephone calls. The staff’s enthusiastic recruitment paid off, and most parent workshops had anywhere from six to twenty adults in attendance. As the young new director of the children’s program, Lidia had a vision of using these parent workshops as the institutional base for a more formal parent organizing campaign to advocate for a bilingual, parent-led, popular education-based pilot school in the neighborhood. She approached me, among other potential allies, for advice and support with this work. Even if the pilot school did not come into fruition, she said, the campaign could mobilize parents as an active political force for educational justice. I took an interest in her vision and agreed to sponsor Independent Study units for undergraduates to intern at Alianza’s children’s program. Through ongoing discussions with Lidia and my own volunteering, I developed a research interest in the campaign. With support from Lidia and Alianza’s Executive Director, I proposed a research project based on long-term ethnographic participant-observation in the parent organizing campaign as well as semi-structured interviews with staff, volunteers, children and parents. As an engaged scholar, I would continue to serve as an ally to the campaign and program volunteer, and commit to a relationship based on reciprocity and dialogue.
In the first year of the study, I conducted participant-observation in all spaces connected to the parent organizing campaign—including staff meetings and strategy sessions, public events and fundraisers, formal and informal gatherings, design team and advisory team meetings, the children’s program, parent meetings and parent workshops. I also completed eight semi-structured interviews with paid and volunteer staff in which I asked about their work at Alianza and their guiding theories of change. Most formal staff meetings and public parent meetings were audiotaped and transcribed as part of my research, and I took detailed ethnographic field notes every day. Toward the end of my first year of data collection, the parent organizing campaign was indefinitely suspended. Alianza accepted a subcontracting deal with a national nonprofit organization to deliver an after-school program described as “popular education aligned to state standards” at two elementary schools, with the goal of raising test scores by three percentage points. This was an unanticipated turn of events, but my ethnographic research continued—following the educator-organizers from the nonprofit organization’s basement into the public-school classrooms where the after-school program was held. I conducted participant observation in classrooms, staff meetings, informal meetings, fundraisers and functions. I also conducted follow-up interviews with the four staff members who taught in the after-school program, in which I asked them to reflect on their teaching both before and after the partnership.
Overall, I worked with Alianza as an ally, volunteer and ethnographer for two years, during which I produced over seven hundred pages of fieldnotes and audio-transcripts (both interview and meeting transcripts). Readers interested in the parent organizing campaign and parent education workshops may find those analyses in Nygreen (2017a) and Nygreen (2017). In this article, I focus on the Alianza children’s program, drawing from observations and interviews with teachers and the program director. Direct quotes are taken from the transcripts of staff meetings, workshops, and interviews. Descriptions of teaching are based on my ethnographic field notes taken during and/or immediately after each observation. I present my findings in the next two sections, which correspond to two phases of the study: community-based popular education and the partnership with schools.
Findings, Part I: community-based popular education
In the summer of 2009, more than 100 children in grades K-5 attended the eight-week summer program. Four teachers, four interns (earning college credits), and the program director, Lidia, worked around the clock teaching children, reflecting on their practice, developing new lessons, acquiring supplies, planning for and facilitating parent meetings, communicating with parents, and strategizing about the parent organizing campaign. All were in their early twenties, second- or 1.5-generation Latino/as, bilingual in Spanish and English, with either a bachelor’s degree or some college education. They were all engaged in some form of social justice activism outside their work at Alianza, and they talked often about the role of education in growing movements for social change. For these politicized young activists, working for a grassroots organization that espoused radical politics and maintained strong community ties was a way to link activism with paid work (no matter how meagerly paid) without sacrificing ideals.
One Saturday afternoon, this group of teachers and interns gathered for a two-hour workshop on popular education facilitated by a graduate student at a nearby university. The workshop opened with an exercise designed to elicit a shared definition of popular education. Each teacher was given a large, blank piece of paper and asked to draw a picture representing their work at Alianza. They then took turns explaining their drawings as the facilitator jotted important words and phrases on a white board. The teachers referenced familiar principles of popular education when describing their drawings, such as using democratic teaching methods (“this is a circle because we have a very democratic process, everyone learns from everyone”), teaching for critical consciousness (“it’s about critical consciousness, or conscientization, and action”), and praxis (“this represents praxis: action–reflection–action”). Their drawings also revealed an awareness of the social context, and how it shaped students’ and their families’ lives. In sharing her picture, Nayeli explained: I’d say all of them [students] are from immigrant backgrounds, so that’s always on my mind, the community we work with. And the majority come from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, different states in Mexico. That’s present with them and with the children. […] And then I added red because there’s a lot of pain coming from the countries that a lot of the parents and families come from. It’s not that they want to be here either. So that’s present too. And some of it’s war, violence, economic struggles, and a variety of things, and that’s a trail that they bring all the way to here. That’s always on my mind, and we try to teach with that awareness. literacy as a value conscientization praxis education is political and it has power education is love, unconditional love to the people teacher–student relationship is key faith in the people people have power and knowledge to change their own realities identity, family, community, social justice, environmental justice who we work with: low social-economic; disempowered; oppressed.
The discussion turned to the differences between popular education and what they called “traditional schooling.” Jorge observed: “Traditional schooling is structured in a way where students of color have a lot of obstacles, a lot of institutional racism. When they step into the classroom the educational system is not set up for them to succeed. They don’t have faith in us or love for us.” Nayeli elaborated: The teacher [in traditional schooling] is the one who has to share the curriculum with the students, who have to learn or memorize it, and are constantly tested on it to see how much they know. If they’re not learning that curriculum they start falling behind and they start getting pushed out of school, and you have what we call dropouts but are really pushouts; they couldn’t, weren’t meant to follow that curriculum. That curriculum is political, trying to teach a certain history, certain language, certain skills that are very mechanical and assembly-line style and just trying to make duplicates that will be the working force of the community and duplicates who will continue to be the bosses. They’re just replicating history over and over again. Whereas popular education is inclusive and multicultural in how it’s open to everybody and not specific to a certain culture, and also has a social justice component to it. We’re fighting against the same type of, or trying to find an answer, trying to survive the systems of oppression that are perpetuated by the school system. Who writes the curriculum for the traditional school system? The same people who’ve been writing it since five hundred years ago. So I would say popular education is the tool, it’s the answer, it’s the response to traditional schooling.
Operationalizing their definition of popular education with children was a challenge that Alianza’s young, energetic teachers took on with enthusiasm. My fieldnotes reveal they spent four, five, or more hours a week in meetings strategizing together, swapping ideas, discussing individual children, planning new curriculum, and reflecting on the implications of every pedagogical choice. The challenge of doing popular education with children was exacerbated by the physical space they worked in—one large open room for nearly 100 children at once, with no playground or field for running around, and only a small outside area (technically an ally) with a few picnic tables that teachers rotated in and out of with their student groups. Over the course of the eight-week summer program, teachers took children on walks through the neighborhood and to a nearby park to investigate research questions about the local environment and ecology. They organized a program-wide community cleanup day in which children, wearing rubber gloves, picked up litter on the surrounding streets and then wrote about the experience for a newsletter focused on community improvement. One teacher bought pots, soil and seeds so children could plant and care for their own growing plants. Another gave children video cameras to record interviews with parents on topics of their own choosing. Teachers incorporated physical activities like yoga, meditation, mindfulness, dance, music and games, and the whole group together engaged in a collective “Fun Thursday” physical activity every week.
Still, maintaining a sense of order amidst the noise and chaos of a hundred young children presented a daily challenge. Teachers expressed reluctance to impose strict behavioral rules; instead, they worked with children to craft community agreements and discuss their underlying principles. Rather than punish students who acted as bullies or chronically misbehaved, they spent hours strategizing together about how to re-engage the child in learning. They attempted to identify underlying issues in the students’ home life or mental health that could be contributing to outbursts. The director, Lidia, worked hard to get to know students individually, especially those experiencing difficulties. She collaborated with their parents, attempting to problem-solve together and locate sources of support for the family. My participant-observations in these settings revealed that Alianza teachers were keenly aware of families’ potentially vulnerable situations, especially those who may be undocumented. They talked explicitly about the criminalization of people of color and the school-to-prison pipeline; they considered the effects of their pedagogical and disciplinary practices in light of these broader patterns.
Near the end of the summer, they led a thematic, interdisciplinary unit about a labor organizing campaign by workers at car washes, locally known as car washeros (described in greater detail in Nygreen, 2017a). For one week, children in all grades learned about the car washeros’ organizing campaign and its underlying issues through math, science, history, economics, social studies and art. Children interviewed their parents about work, learned about wage disparities and environmental hazards that workers faced, and made protest signs displaying messages of solidarity. One boy discovered that his father worked in one of the carwashes that was organizing. The week culminated in a trip to a rally to support the striking workers, where children held their own hand-made signs. This unit was collaboratively planned by all the teachers and involved all 100+ children in the program. Teachers unanimously described the car washero unit as a success, and an example of how popular education could be adapted for children. Reflecting on the unit later in an interview, Luciana said: “Popular education is about helping people become conscious, or conscientization, but also leading to action. It has to have that action component. That’s why it was so important going to the rally.”
The summer ended with an all-day staff retreat at program director Lidia’s modest apartment. Teachers arrived exhausted from eight weeks of intense, emotionally and cognitively demanding work. But they were also brimming with optimism, giddy with anticipation of the future, and wired with adrenaline. The living room filled with sounds of laughter, jokes, exasperated exhales, and impromptu singing as teachers got comfortable on the couch and the carpet, exchanged hugs, and traded shoulder massages. The retreat was at once joyous and solemn, celebratory and serious, and emotionally moving (Nygreen, Saba and Moreno (2016) for an ethnographic vignette). But most importantly for this story, it was also the setting in which program director Lidia broke the news of Alianza’s funding crisis. Rumblings about a lack of funds had been mounting all summer, but by the end of August it had become clear that Alianza was on the verge of closing its doors. High demand for the program in the community, coupled with Lidia’s unwillingness to turn families away, meant it had grown larger than its meager budget could support. The staff had organized three fundraisers over the summer that were well-attended, joyous community-building events, but these generated a tiny proportion of funds needed to sustain a program of its size. All the grants Lidia had submitted in recent months had been denied. Alianza had been borrowing space from an ally nonprofit, but this arrangement was understood to be temporary. After summarizing all this, Lidia announced the four paid teachers, and herself, would take a two-week “unpaid vacation,” and it was yet to be determined if they could return after that.
Upon hearing this news, teachers eagerly offered to do whatever they could to help. Some volunteered to assist with grant-writing. Someone suggested they attend a grant-writing class together during the unpaid vacation. Jorge agreed, adding: “I think every teacher should learn to write grants.” The group was determined, unanimously voicing their dedication to Alianza and their commitment to keep its doors open. Despite their enthusiasm, it was ultimately not these efforts that kept Alianza open; it was a partnership through which Alianza would run an after-school program at two public elementary schools. Lidia and Nayeli worked through their unpaid “vacation” to secure the partnership. Elsewhere, I have discussed this transition and its surrounding circumstances it in greater detail (Nygreen, 2017a). In this article, I skip past many of those details to focus only on the immediate impacts of the partnership for Alianza’s teachers and their pedagogical practice. One important point of information for readers, however, is that fifth grade teacher Nayeli became the new program director (at Lidia’s recommendation and with her support), after Lidia resigned to accept another job. In the next section, I continue the story of Alianza in the post-partnership phase.
Findings, Part II: partnership with schools
In the first staff meeting after the two-week unpaid “vacation,” Nayeli announced the good news that Alianza would stay open thanks to the partnership. She explained, a national nonprofit organization had hired Alianza as a subcontractor to deliver an after-school program at two public elementary schools. The agreement allowed Alianza to retain four part-time teachers and a program director for the school year. To secure this deal, she and Lidia had pitched Alianza as a program offering “popular education aligned to state standards.” Students would be selected by their school principals, and the program would start in October. Alianza was expected to raise participating students’ test scores by three percentage points. They had four weeks to prepare.
This was the first time I had ever heard student test scores or state standards given much, if any, prominence in an Alianza staff meeting. Yet without discussion, the group moved quickly to the next agenda item: fundraising. Nayeli reported back on two fund-raising workshops she had attended during the “vacation.” There was now an online calendar, she said, showing upcoming request for proposal (RFP) deadlines and a grant-writing workshop that staff were expected to attend. She gave information about grants she was working on, and the group talked about how to approach fundraising. Then Nayeli introduced a new unpaid intern, Scott, who was a doctoral student at a nearby university. A white man in his late twenties and a former classroom teacher, Scott had chosen Alianza as a site for a required community-based internship. Among other work, Scott would help teachers align their curriculum to state standards by delivering a staff training as well as individual consultations to help each teacher craft standards-based, grade-specific lesson plans.
My conversations with Nayeli around this time revealed that she had mixed feelings about the partnership, and the decision to do it was not made lightly. Nevertheless, she adopted a positive outlook, reasoning that the partnership offered a chance to gain legitimacy for Alianza and strengthen its education program. In an interview, she said: “Even though it’s a traditional school with its own standards and its own requirements to fulfill—and we are very aware of that—I feel like it is an infiltration or something like that, an opportunity to try doing something really different.” As well, she said Alianza had significant autonomy: “Even at the schools, they gave us a task but they’re not supervising that task. We’re still doing our own thing there.” In short, Nayeli framed the partnership not as a compromise but an infiltration—an opportunity to bring Alianza’s radical popular education methodology into the schools and hence to reach more children. In the remainder of this section I consider the question: Was Alianza infiltrating the schools, or the other way around? I identify two immediate adjustments made by teachers in the first months of the partnership: teaching to the test; and chasing data.
Teaching to the test
Four months into the partnership with schools, I observed Jorge’s second grade group on a typical Monday. Moments after the school bell rang, children began entering the classroom, full of boisterous energy, with oversized backpacks sagging from their small shoulders. Jorge spent several minutes encouraging children to sit down and get quiet. Then he administered a practice multiple-choice test. He reminded children to stay silent, stay seated, and mark their answers on the page without discussing them. Although the practice exercise was only fifteen minutes, it felt excruciatingly long. Children squirmed in their seats, whispered and giggled, looked listlessly around the room. One boy crawled under his desk and started banging it with a pencil from underneath. Jorge, miraculously, convinced him to return to his seat. After collecting the practice tests, Jorge said he would return them the next day with their scores and discuss the answers. He moved quickly to the next activity—a handout with math problems that children worked on together in small groups. Jorge walked around the room helping children with the worksheets. Several kids seemed more focused on goofing off—climbing on tables, poking and touching each other, walking about the room—and a few zoned out completely. Jorge did his best to maintain order by offering reminders and consequences to students. At last, it was time for a fifteen-minute recess, and the children lined up to walk silently in a single-file line to the playground.
In the subsequent days that week, I observed other Alianza classrooms with a similar feel. A typical class began with a teacher demonstrating how to do a specific task (for example, subtracting double-digit numbers, reading time on a clock, and filling in the appropriate preposition in a sentence), and then passing out worksheets for children to practice the skill. I often saw children being reminded to stay still, stay quiet, and stay on task. I saw worksheets that offered practice drills and multiple-choice questions that looked like standardized tests. I saw children lining up to walk in single file lines to the playground for a fifteen-minute break before returning to class and working for another hour on lessons. It was just like school, but after school. I also witnessed some creative activities—such as when Daniela brought cotton balls and construction paper, which she had purchased with her own money, so children could draw pictures of the sky and use the cotton as clouds. On their pictures of the sky, each child wrote their “dream” for the future, and Daniela followed up with a discussion about the DREAM Act. 1 I witnessed teacher-led discussions on topics of migration, the rights of undocumented students, and the importance of college education; however, with few exceptions, these discussions were not integrated with the teacher-centered lessons of basic skills that occupied the majority of classroom time.
In my follow-up interviews, I asked teachers to talk about their teaching and whether it had changed as a result of the partnership. I did not ask directly about teaching-to-the test because I wanted to see whether and how teachers would bring this up on their own. All four of them did. Daniela admitted right away to a heavy focus on test preparation with her second-grade class, noting: “We were hired by [the nonprofit], and the objective was to raise the tests by three percent. They didn’t say, you have to do it this way, you have to do it that way. It just, well, I feel pressured by that.” When asked how her teaching had changed in response to this pressure, she said she started using multiple-choice questions to structure class discussions so students could get used to the multiple-choice format. She said she administered a practice test of reading comprehension using a passage about Dolores Huerta, the Latina labor leader and civil rights activist, but then followed it up with a more comprehensive learning experience about Huerta’s work and the history of Latina/o labor organizing. Her third example was doing a yoga lesson with children and telling them: “You can use this [yoga] when you’re taking the test, before you take the test so you can relax and then you can think better.” I had witnessed Alianza teachers lead yoga and meditation exercises with children previously, but this was the first time I heard it justified as a tool to improve test performance. Daniela hastened to add that she planned to return to her old ways as soon as the tests were over in April. When I asked how her teaching would change after the tests, she said, “It will be more flexible. I feel like it will be more, like we can be more about what Alianza is” [author’s emphasis].
Luciana, who taught the third graders, said her teaching was largely focused on the upcoming standardized tests. Then she invoked a discourse of inevitability that naturalized testing as a necessary part of schooling: “You’re never going to escape out of tests. They’re always going to be part of your life. If you want to go to college, […] even get a license for a profession, you have to take a test. I think the least that we can do is help them get the skills for taking the test. And then we can make the content a little bit more relevant.” Jorge said his teaching had become more “banking style” due to anxiety about test scores. He explained: For me it’s quite a challenge because we do have certain tasks, and very big ones too, important ones too, to raise their test scores. I really started thinking about things like that when I was writing my lesson plans for the schools. I’ve had writer’s block, or popular education block, thinking about the test scores and state standards and all of those things. I get a little confused because, yeah, I know, okay, so we’re going to help them with their standardized testing, so first we are focused on trying to help them in the areas that they’re going to be tested on. Right? But, yeah, I don’t know … I don’t know how far to push the testing side rather than the popular education side. It feels like you have to do two things at once.
Teachers did wrestle with the challenge, and some recognized the internal contradictions of their charge, as when Celia said it felt like being pulled in two opposite directions. Yet, they also seemed to hold on tightly to the belief that popular education could be aligned to state standards, and that any difficulties they faced could be overcome through their own hard work. As Jorge said: “I feel that once I learn how it works, then I’m gonna find the right balance between using ‘pop ed’ but also covering the state standards, and also making sure that—whatever the activity or lessons are—they are able to, in the end, raise those test scores.” Instead of interrogating epistemological and paradigmatic contradictions between popular education and standards-based test-driven instruction, Jorge framed these as challenges of practice that his own hard work could overcome. He adopted the discourse of both/and—asserting both the possibility and virtue of “doing it all”—teaching for test scores and liberation, simultaneously, without sacrificing the integrity of either.
This discourse of both/and is attractive because it saves educators from having to (appear to) “choose sides” between the standards and the project of liberatory education. Since the reform movement has by now so thoroughly transformed schooling, some engagement with standardized testing is a quite simply a requirement. If they want to work in a public school, teachers have little choice but to find a way to accommodate this imperative; this was as true for Alianza’s teachers as it is for public school teachers. The discourse of both/and seems to provide a way forward by calling on teachers to do, in Celia’s words, “two things at once.” This demand resonates with what Beth Sondel (2015: 300) calls the “double curriculum.” In her study of a teacher who adopted this stance, Sondel observes, “Teaching this double curriculum came along with double the responsibility, planning, and expectations on [the teacher] and her students” (Sondel, 2015: 301). Despite this “double” responsibility, however, teachers in Alianza and elsewhere are not provided with double the resources or double the time; hence, they and their students experience an intensification of workload. When Alianza’s teachers admitted to falling short in their ability to meet this double responsibility, they cited their lack of experience and vowed to try harder. They internalized the imperative to raise test scores and responsibilized themselves as individuals to achieve those ends.
The specter of testing not only influenced teachers’ classroom practice but also exerted a larger power in terms of reframing the core work of popular education. Below, I describe how this occurred as teachers’ time and energy became increasingly consumed with the elusive task of chasing data for the purpose of raising funds.
Chasing data
Four months after starting the school-based partnership program, an informal conversation with Nayeli grew into a deep philosophical discussion about how to document the impacts of popular education in terms that are legible to funders, school principals, and education reformers. Nayeli said she needed to collect data to document Alianza’s impact on student achievement. The principals of the two partner schools only cared about one kind of data—student test scores. But Nayeli said Alianza had broader and deeper learning goals, and she wanted a way to capture those too. At this point in our conversation, I asked to begin audio-recording so I could use her words as data for my study (irony duly noted). With her permission, the rest of our conversation was recorded and treated as an interview. She reiterated: “I’m really attached to measuring both the social and cultural objectives and the academic objectives [of Alianza].”
She immediately shared an anecdote about a fourth grader, Veronica, to illustrate the point: Veronica, she used to hide her Spanish–English dictionary, and was so quiet at the beginning of the session. By the end of the session she was nonstop, she was out, and her Spanish–English dictionary was out and opened and proud. So those are things that I feel are so important to document. I feel those are tremendous impacts and those are life-long impacts.
But Nayeli needed to put them in numbers to show potential funders and her partnering school principals that Alianza’s popular education methodology “worked.” Toward that end, she asked me for assistance developing an assessment instrument to document Alianza’s impacts holistically. We worked on the project for several months. We invited a consultant to help develop a pilot, and involved the staff in a series of meetings to identify key learning outcomes and possible assessment questions. We piloted an initial version of a pre- and post-assessment—a survey administered verbally in Spanish, and utilizing “Q-sort” methodology (van Exel and De Graaf, 2005)—with one group of students. I applied for (but did not receive) a grant to help support the assessment project. I was optimistic that the development, implementation, and analysis process would help teachers reflect on their practice, collaborate with each other, and align their pedagogical practice with their core values. We “dreamed big” of involving parents in the process of administering surveys in Spanish, perhaps even spawning a participatory evaluation cycle that would continuously strengthen the program while simultaneously producing concrete “evidence” of its impact, which could be included in grant proposals.
However, the workload demands of such an ambitious project were formidable. Alianza’s teachers worked part-time—paid only for the hours they were in the classroom with children—and all held additional jobs outside of Alianza in addition to various political organizing commitments; two of the four were also part-time students. I set up systems for data entry and data management, but surveys took upwards of twenty minutes each to administer and the workload quickly spiraled to heights beyond the organization’s capacity to maintain. Teachers’ routine work included preparing daily lesson plans, debriefing and collaborating with each other, and continuing to strategize long term about the parent organizing campaign—which had been temporarily suspended but remained very much alive in the discourse and imagination of staff. Teachers also participated in fundraising efforts, and much of their staff meeting time was dedicated to topics of fundraising, grant writing, and upcoming RFPs. Although this work was uncompensated, staff took it on as a demonstration of their commitment to the cause, and continuous fundraising was thus integrated as part of their routine work responsibilities. In this context, the demands of administering a holistic verbal assessment on a routine basis, not to mention entering and keeping track of volumes of data over time, bumped up against the reality of Alianza’s limited funding and capacity. With staff stretched thin, the assessment effort was quietly dropped.
Dropping the assessment project removed one of the major time- and labor-intensive tasks expected of Alianza teachers, but probably did not affect the quality of the program itself. Although we reasoned that the assessment—if we used a participatory evaluation approach—could potentially help improve the quality of Alianza’s program, our primary motivation was to document its success, not generate it. The need to document success was directly tied to the need for continuous fundraising. Raising funds, raising scores, and chasing data were all seen as means to the goal of keeping Alianza’s doors open. These activities were required of Alianza merely to stay afloat. But these activities are not the core work of popular education; they are second order activities, or tasks that exist solely for the purpose of demonstrating compliance or effectiveness (Canaan, 2008; Shore and Wright, 2000). The core work of popular education is relational, community-building, emotional and cognitive work; it involves lesson preparation, reflecting on practice, assessing student work, getting to know children and families, listening to them, and collaborating with them and with other educators, among other things. The time and energy that Alianza’s teachers put into raising funds, raising scores, and chasing data is time and energy that comes from somewhere. It is not a limitless resource.
In Alianza, as elsewhere, these second-order labor tasks came to occupy so much time and energy that other aspects of teachers’ work dropped away to make space for them. This includes the liberatory work of popular education dropping away to make space for practice tests done in silence and explicit lessons on how to follow instructions. It includes the hours once spent in staff meetings strategizing about struggling children and reaching out to their parents slowly dropping away to make time for grant-writing updates and fundraising pep talks. Eventually, the parent workshops and parent organizing campaign dropped away too. Each adjustment seemed small, temporary, and pragmatic on its own but over time they added up to consequential shifts in organizational practices, priorities, and identities. As Biesta (2004: 241) writes: “In the end, we are left with a situation in which systems, institutions, and individual people adapt themselves to the imperatives of the logic of accountability, so that accountability becomes an end in itself rather than a means for achieving other ends.” In Alianza as elsewhere, these subtle shifts slowly remake our work in ways that align with neoliberal reform. The story offers just one small example of how neoliberal governmentality operates every day in educational institutions.
Conclusion: troubling the discourse of both/and
In this article, I told the story of Alianza as they evolved from a community-based program housed at a CBO to an after-school program housed in two public elementary schools. I argue that this move changed the nature of Alianza’s work, resulting in a shift away from the core work of popular education and toward the second-order tasks of raising scores, raising funds, and chasing data. This story offers one example of how coercive accountability regimes can reshape educational processes, organizations, and subjectivities in subtle yet consequential ways—consequential because they contribute to the making of neoliberal subjects. This story of Alianza raises questions for all educators working to bring critical or social justice pedagogies into formal classroom spaces: Can Freire-style popular education be relocated into schools and deployed to raise standardized test scores? At what point does it cease to be popular education at all?
As I have attempted to show throughout this article, Alianza’s young-adult popular educators were skilled and thoughtful practitioners who embraced Freirean aims of collective, political, social and cultural change. Yet when the context and conditions of their teaching changed, they disciplined themselves—without the need for direct control—and adjusted their pedagogy to prioritize the new, singularly important aim of raising student test scores. The dramatic shift in their teaching exemplifies how, in Power’s words, “audits do as much to construct definitions of quality and performance as to monitor them” (Power, 1994: 33). Alianza teachers knew that students’ scores would be recorded, traced back to their classes, and used to make judgements about their own and the program’s “effectiveness.” The audit itself—in this case, the standardized high-stakes testing regime—constructed a particular definition of effectiveness, and then teachers accommodated, made adjustments, and re-inscribed that definition in small, subtle, day-to-day actions as they carried out their work.
As reflective practitioners who also brought a critical analysis of schooling to this work, all four Alianza teachers acknowledged the challenges, and some of the inherent contradictions, of attempting to integrate popular education with standardized test preparation. To deal with these contradictions, they did what most educators do: adopt the discourse of both/and. While recognizing the strategic uses of this discourse for critical educators working in and with formal schools, my aim in this article is to trouble the discourse of both/and by revealing how it operates as a technology of neoliberal governance. The discourse of both/and implies the commonsense (but inaccurate) assumption that standards are politically neutral, and merely a basic foundation upon which a critical curriculum can be built. If test scores are neutral measures of student learning, there should be no contradiction between the aims of popular education and the aim of raising scores. But test scores and the official curriculum they measure are far from neutral; this is one of the first and most essential arguments in Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1999).
The discourse of both/and denies the politics of knowledge that are embedded within standards as codified “official knowledge.” It reduces popular education to a technique that can be applied to the end of raising test scores—ripped of its political critique and out of its historical context as a method of liberation and collective social action. It reframes epistemological and paradigmatic contradictions between popular education and standardized test-driven instruction as challenges of practice that can be overcome through hard work and skill development. It obscures how testing is a technology of governance rather than an educative practice. Lastly, it responsibilizes individual educators to meet problematic targets. Just as women cannot really “have it all” in a patriarchal society, perhaps educators cannot “do it all” under coercive accountability regimes. Instead of addressing deep structural inequities and the devastating impacts of austerity on families, children, and public education institutions, the discourse of both/and responsibilizes educators as individuals and intensifies educator workloads with increasing second-order demands. As we adjust and adapt to these demands, we remake ourselves as neoliberal subjects.
In troubling the discourse of both/and, my aim is to illuminate processes of hegemony and neoliberal governmentality—and not to discredit the hard work, thoughtful analysis, and agency of educators in Alianza and elsewhere. As an ally and participant in Alianza, I was equally implicated in the processes of neoliberal subject-making. I expect that all readers of this article can recognize themes of neoliberal governmentality and coercive accountability in their own work lives, whether in higher education, K12, or the nonprofit sector. Audit culture is reshaping our work, the conditions of our work, and the discourses we have available to give meaning to our work. As we adjust, accommodate, and respond to new demands, we shift how we understand ourselves. Gradually, aims that were once central may take a back seat as other, more urgent demands take priority in terms of our time and energy. Each small adjustment may feel trivial and pragmatic, but over time we can lose the core values of what brought us to education in the first place. My goal in troubling the discourse of both/and is to shed light on these processes, for it is only with such understanding that we can begin to find—or create—spaces of resistance.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.