Getting Schooled: James Cairns Reviews Paul Bocking’s Public Education, Neoliberalism, and Teachers: New York, Mexico City, Toronto
What Matters Now
Schools are full of contradictions. On one hand, students look to school for skills and ideas that help people grow, compete on the job market, support loved ones, and navigate complex local and global affairs. On the other hand, schools are responsible for preparing all but the most privileged young people for lives as wage-workers, which means training students to follow rules, obey authority, and discipline their bodies. Schools meet needs of business elites and the nation-state at the same time as they meet needs of communities and individuals hungry for learning and publicly-funded collective spaces.
Paul Bocking. Public Education, Neoliberalism, and Teachers: New York, Mexico City, Toronto. University of Toronto Press. $45.00 316 pp., ISBN 9781487506605
Teachers are at the front line of these struggles. They are educators and care workers, expected both to support and discipline young people. Teachers are pulled by divided responsibilities: to students and parents, to local communities, and to their employers. These tensions have been especially visible in Ontario lately, where the Conservative government is pursuing deep cuts to education. Doug Ford’s government has been blunt about forcing schools to make do with less in order to drive down students’ expectations about what they deserve as workers and citizens. Teachers and their unions are fighting to protect students, as well as teachers’ professional autonomy, in the name of defending a more robust vision of social rights and the public sphere. In recent years in Chicago, Los Angeles, West Virginia, and other parts of the US, teachers have waged similar struggles against neoliberal reform.
Paul Bocking’s book argues that contemporary education policy is largely about attacking teachers’ professional autonomy. Such attacks take different forms: from changes to governance, to curriculum redesign, to new employment regimes. Education reform in the neoliberal era effectively narrows “the capacity and freedom of teachers to exercise their judgment in interpreting broad curriculum guidelines established by the state into their day-to-day classroom activities.”
Bocking, who draws on his experiences as a high-school teacher, union activist, and scholar of Labour Studies, works with “a collective notion of ‘professionalism.’” The autonomy of teachers he’s arguing for is not simply about adhering to craft norms, or the claim of individual teachers to special expertise. Bocking’s sense of teacher professionalism compels teachers to exercise collective self-regulation in order to meet the needs of students and communities “within a larger context of a democratically accountable public education system.”
The book is organized around three case studies: in New York City, Mexico City, and Toronto, spanning the years 2000-2017. Each case combines historical research, policy analysis, and interviews with dozens of teachers. There are risks in this approach. Neoliberal education policy is multidimensional and shapeshifting. As someone who’s written about the McGuinty-Wynne approach to education in Ontario, I’m aware of the challenges of critically assessing neoliberalism in one jurisdiction alone. Doing so across three world cities, with very different histories and cultures, political systems, socio-economic characteristics, and relationships to international institutions, could easily have produced an incoherent book, one lost either in disjointed details or unable to dive below obvious generalizations.
Instead, Bocking provides a coherent story about what neoliberal education policy means for teachers as workers, and how teachers’ unions are pushing back (or not) against attacks on teacher professionalism. The case studies provide an overarching framework for understanding neoliberal education reform as a project for destroying teacher autonomy.
Core policy trends, such as the “centralization of governance,” can look different in New York than Toronto. For example, in the former, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of education policy from local school boards in 2002; in the latter, control of education finance was uploaded from municipalities to the province in 1997. The result, Bocking shows, is the same in both places: namely, “a weakening of local democratic control.”
A second trend, increasing managerialism in workplace relations, saw principals removed from teachers’ unions in Mexico in 2017. The same was done in Toronto twenty years earlier. In Bloomberg’s New York, principals were handed control of the entire school budget, “including a fixed amount for staff payroll that encouraged the hiring of low-seniority, and thereby, low-cost, teachers.”
Third, and perhaps most familiar, given their high profile in local and national media, the new regime of high-stakes standardized testing and “quantitative metrics” have profoundly shaped teachers’ professional judgement across all three jurisdictions. The publicly-released results of standardized tests are not linked to teacher evaluation in Toronto as they are in New York and Mexico; however, in all three jurisdictions, there is tremendous pressure to “teach to the test” on account of the way test scores can attract or discourage student enrollment, and are used to make financial decisions. The new regime of standardized testing is fueling the marketization of schooling, which Bocking identifies as a fourth trend. Especially in Toronto and New York, heightened competition among public schools (or against charter schools) for enrollment, is the new normal.
Generally speaking, teachers’ unions have assumed a defensive position; but exactly how unions are responding to neoliberal reforms depends on the local context. In New York, the teachers Bocking interviewed were highly critical of the United Federation of Teachers’ lack of opposition to Bloomberg’s neoliberal agenda. Nevertheless, a caucus known as the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) is building an oppositional program inside the UFT. Working in solidarity with community organizations, MORE has claimed modest victories against the standardized testing regime, and was instrumental in forcing resistant New York authorities to halt classes in March to guard against the coronavirus pandemic. As of mid-April, 21 New York City teachers had died of COVID-19.
In Mexico City, where the major teachers’ union is tied to the state, challenges to official policy emerge through the dissident National Coordination of Education Workers movement. The unofficial character of the dissident movement is a disadvantage when compared to the “stronger institutional standing” of unions in Toronto, especially given the “strongly oppositional” history of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation. However, Bocking, argues, the institutional security of Toronto-based teachers has likely inhibited the development of “organic linkages to organized civil society groups, which were so important to the successes of the Mexican movement,” especially in southeastern states, against a wave of neoliberal policies in 2012.
Regardless of the differences in state power and union organization, Bocking argues that the best way forward in all three cases for teachers as workers – and, more broadly, for public education (and, by extension, the future of democracy) – is the centering and strengthening of teachers’ professional autonomy. Governments and policymakers are not going to lead such a transition. In most cases, as we see in Ontario today, they’ll fight viciously against it. Bocking is clear-eyed about the fact that winning teacher autonomy will only come through struggles from below that involve building alliances with parents, students, and community groups.
Certainly, this struggle means placing demands for greater autonomy squarely on the bargaining table. This might look like negotiating for smaller class sizes, better school resources, more planning time, stronger job security, maybe even free meal programs and the end to high-stakes standardized testing. But it also means developing new cultures of research and action within teachers’ unions: “Teachers’ unions must become the primary, popularly recognized authority on what constitutes good teaching, and they should gain this status by developing considerable effort to obtaining a deep participation of its membership.”
Readers looking for a systematic analysis of education policy in the twenty-first century will thank me for recommending this book. While the book is unlikely to be on many 2020 Beach Read lists, Bocking is an accessible and lively writer. The book reads like a smart deep-dive in a publication such as The Conversation or Jacobin, aimed at an engaged, general audience. The book is rigorously researched, combining dozens of interviews and observations across the three cities with a critical reading of policy documents, contemporary scholarship in the field of education, and theories of worker power. Rest assured, however: this is not scholar-to-scholar arcana.
Bocking makes a major contribution to questions about what neoliberal education reform looks like on the ground, what it means for teachers as workers, what it tells us about state and business policymakers’ plans for the future more broadly, and, crucially, what resisting these trends and making a different future will involve.
James Cairns is associate professor of Social and Environmental Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Senior Editor at Hamilton Review of Books. He is the co-author (with Alan Sears) of The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press, 2012). His most recent book is The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2017).