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Paper short abstract:

This proposal takes up an anthropology of education policy (Castagno & McCarty, 2018) to explore two historical moments that have contributed to the production of “bad teachers” as political subjects in the United States.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal takes up an anthropology of education policy (Castagno & McCarty, 2018) to explore the historical production of “bad teachers” in the United States. Analyzing reforms, policies, and a range of archival materials about teacher quality and teacher performance, I explore how educational institutions and popular discourses have made sense of “bad teachers.” To do so, I revisit two commonly explored moments in U.S. education history—the late-1950s and the mid-1980s (in the wake of Sputnik and A Nation at Risk respectively). Where educational research has commonly explored these moments as perceived crises of teacher quality or educational achievement (e.g. Johanningmeier, 2010), this proposal looks at the making of a specific political subject called a “bad teacher.” The “bad teacher” resides at the core of moments of educational crisis. Both periods reveal historically contingent features of this subject. At the same time, shared themes in how the “bad teacher” is racialized, classed, gendered, and the curriculum and pedagogy they allegedly undertake reveal persistent understandings of who and what counts as “bad” (and thus undesirable) within U.S. schools. Understanding “bad” subjects within a system also sees the ways in which undesirable ways of knowing and being carry productive potential to enact an educational otherwise. In this way, these histories entwine with a larger ethnographic project I have undertaken on the everyday experiences and educational practices of teachers who have been marked as “bad” within urban schools in the U.S.