Banking on ignorance

A spatial inquiry into the truncated politics of charter school teachers

Bibliographic Data

ID4142155
AuthorsC Cahen (0000-0002-0882-2338, Virginia Tech, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume56
Issue8
Pages2105-2120
Publication date2024-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0308518x241269364
OpenAlexW4402226023
LanguageEN
References cited27

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

Charter · Charter school · Ignorance · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Employment and Welfare Studies · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

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