Teacher power in the digital age
Creators: name: Reichel, Matt
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: Teacher Power in the Digital Age is an examination of the confluence of social, political and communicative forces animating the teachers’ uprising of the last decade: beginning with the accession of a militant slate to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in 2011 and continuing with the nationwide uprising of 2018-19. During this time, thousands of teachers have protested, petitioned, gone on strike, walked out and engaged in sickouts in dozens of states and jurisdictions throughout the country, thus ending a period of decades of relative inactivity on the part of teachers as a political organizing force. The core issues driving teachers to action have ranged from: stagnant wages, inadequate education funding, school closures in disadvantaged communities, loss of autonomy at the hands of federal mandates tying school funding to standardized testing, and the funneling of resources away from traditional public schools to charter schools and other so-called “choice schools.” Existing scholarship on this movement has generally focused on its organizational capacities and its broader consequences for labor relations. Ashby and Bruno, Uetricht, Brogan, Blanc have all done exemplary work in this regard. This dissertation departs from that literature by situating the movement, instead, within the broader “movements of the squares” - including the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, the Indignados and the Arab Spring – due to the fact that all of these uprisings took shape on social media and were born of the hegemonic crisis of neoliberal capitalism. These movements have directed their ire at growing social and economic inequalities, the increasingly authoritarian nature of governance and the inadequacies of existing organs of representative democracy. Not only have these movements posed themselves against what they view to be a rapacious power elite, but also against democratic institutions that they see as being compromised by neoliberal logics.My argument is that the same mistrust has been present within the teachers’ movement, as participants have often expressed frustration with the inadequacy of their union leadership in confronting the neoliberal reforms promulgated over the past few decades. They saw their movement, in part, as a mechanism by which they could push their unions to heightened militancy. In this sense, I contend that it was an “outside-inside” movement, in which activists fought both outside and within their representative body. Nonetheless, I also argue that the existing union infrastructure has served as a vital institutional anchor which has served to evade the problem of ephemerality that has plagued other movements in this wave of contestation. In sum, the power of teacher activists stems from the unique combination of old institutional forms and new digital mechanisms of resistance used in tandem. The institutional support of the union coupled with the networking affordances of digital communication technologies have allowed teacher activists to engage an organizational and communicative intervention that have forced their unions to be more responsive around the unique sets of issues facing teachers and education in the neoliberal epoch. At the same time, the focus on communication and messaging – rather than narrowly focusing on bargaining around contractual issues – has empowered teachers to combat the dominant discourses promulgated by the nation’s elite on teachers and education. Specifically, neoliberal reformers have tended to use demonizing rhetoric about the dysfunction plaguing public schools to initiate a set of reforms that narrowly fault teachers for poor student performance (rather than larger social issues). By organizing social movements with the broader communities impacted by these policies, teachers have been able to shift these discourses in a more favorable direction.