Neoliberal Education Reform : Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts 2015012022, 9781138831674, 9781315736464

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Neoliberal Education Reform

The restructuring of teaching is a global issue, the result of a transnational movement of policy. Gender shapes the occupational reform and binds the global-to-the-local movement of reform ideas. Gender is also implicated in how policy is done and how it leads to particular outcomes. This volume examines the behind-the-scenes work done to make sense of reform and implement it during the workday. It also questions the new forms and controls over teaching—the labor process—revealed. Based on ethnographic research 96 at public high schools in Argentina, this volume introduces the everyday work lives of teachers. It includes interviews and observations revealing what it means to be a teacher in the reform context, and explores the ways masculinities and femininities shape teachers’ decision-making about reforms. At a time when teachers are at the center of political controversy around the world, this volume is an important reminder that school change is about changing the work of teachers. Sarah A. Robert is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Buffalo, USA.

Routledge Studies in Education and Neoliberalism

Series editor Dave Hill, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford and Cambridge, England

1 The Rich World and the Impoverishment of Education Diminishing Democracy, Equity and Workers’ Rights Edited by Dave Hill 2 Contesting Neoliberal Education Public Resistance and Collective Advance Edited by Dave Hill 3 Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences Edited by Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar 4 The Developing World and State Education Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian Alternatives Edited by Dave Hill and Ellen Rosskam 5 The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools Edited by Philip E. Kovacs

  6 Colonized Schooling Exposed Progressive Voices for Transformative Educational and Social Change Edited by Pierre Wilbert Orelus, Curry S. Malott, and Romina Pacheco  7 Underprivileged School Children and the Assault on Dignity Policy Challenges and Resistance Edited by Julia Hall   8 Hegemony and Education under Neoliberalism Insights from Gramsci By Peter Mayo   9 Female Students and Cultures of Violence in Cities Edited by Julia Hall 10 Neoliberal Education Reform Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts By Sarah A. Robert

Neoliberal Education Reform Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts By Sarah A. Robert

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Sarah A. Robert to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robert, Sarah A.   Neoliberal education reform : gendered notions in global and local contexts / by Sarah A. Robert.    pages cm — (Routledge studies in education and neoliberalism ; 10)   Includes index.   1.  Sex discrimination in education.  2.  Teaching—Sex differences. 3. Neoliberalism. 4.  Educational change.  I.  Title.   LC212.8.R63 2016  370.81—dc23  2015012022 ISBN: 978-1-138-83167-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73646-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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Contents

Preface Introduction to Global and Local Interest in Reorganizing Teachers’ Work: Comparing Stories

ix

1

1 Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments

17

2 How We Get Work: Gendering Teacher Preparation, Licensure, and the Job of Getting a Job

26

3 Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures in a Meaningless Reform

52

4 Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses

70

5 Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society

96

6 Conclusions and New Beginnings: Teachers as Policy Protagonists Index

118 123

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Preface

Each year most of the thousands of pages written about teaching focus on what teachers do when standing in front of their classroom: what they teach, how they teach it, and what their students learn. Yet few of those pages address teaching as work—the behind-the-scenes efforts of individuals who wish to earn a living teaching, and the work outside the classroom required to support teaching within it. Still fewer pages address teaching as gendered work, an occupation in which women are in the majority doing what is considered women’s work. Teaching is a feminine and feminized occupation that involves more than just time in front of students. Teaching around the world involves street-level bureaucrats (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003; Weatherley & Lipsky, 1977), mostly women, in the interpretation and implementation of neoliberal education reforms. What does a teacher’s workday look like outside those hours in front of the kids? How is that work affected by reforms borrowed from private-sector notions of accountability, worker flexibility, choice, standardization, incentives, and the “free market”? How is gender involved in the neoliberal transformation of the occupation? And how does an expanded view of teachers’ gendered work affect our understanding of the politics of education reform? I invite you to read the pages that follow where I examine these questions through a rich ethnographic and comparative look at high school teachers’ work lives. At a time when teachers are at the center of political controversy around the world, the stories that follow are an important reminder that school change is about changing the work of teachers. The restructuring of teaching is a global issue, the result of a transnational movement of policy and knowledge. Yet for many readers, the global transformation of teaching is personal and it is a local issue. Perhaps you are a parent or a teacher or an education student or a researcher (or all of the above!) and whether you like it or not, whether you are too busy or not, you must pay attention to changes proposed for your public schools. The proposals are perhaps in your face and in your ear each and every day. You could, if asked, pelt out in written or oral form the text below, which my United States and Buffalo, NY, based writing editor—unprompted—was able to do:

x  Preface Education is much in the news these days, No Child Left Behind, the debate over teacher’s salaries and unions (especially in states with rabidly anti-union governors), the (some might say botched) implementation of “core curricula,” fights against tenure and bringing more accountability to under-performing districts through financial penalties, questions around inner-city districts, resources, the push for privatized charter schools as opposed to public institutions, testing and the attempt to devise matrices that analyze education through highly data-driven (test-based) tools. Behind this is the media back-lash, the castigation of teachers (still predominantly female in the U.S. primary education system) as “fat-cat” instigators, who get three months off a year, etc. The on-going battles for equal pay for equal work, and so forth. Not to mention America’s consistently abysmal rankings in global education assessment. This is a context that most Americans understand thoroughly—we pay taxes towards these resources, our children are directly affected by them. However, in the pages that follow, I ask you, reader, to consider the case of Argentina. What is in these pages that is for you—especially the United States-based reader—is a chance to see how neoliberal reforms play out in another setting. I ask you to step outside your comfort zone to examine a context that may seem strange, but that will seem eerily similar to a school district and a reform context near you. You may find yourself asking: why do they organize school that way? For example, why do many students attend school just in the morning or just in the afternoon? However, you need look no further than your vocational-tech-career programs to see a similar model implemented in the United States, where students attend school for academics during the morning then head to shop class. You may wonder: why should I spend time reading about how Argentina is changing their public schools? Yet, is teacher preparation changing where you live? I bet it is—for better and for worse. School day length, content, and teacher preparation are as unique and local in nature as they are global. Reform of teaching varies, although not as much as we presume it would when traveling across national boundaries. In the United States it varies from state to state and even local district to local district. I compare/contrast changes to teachers’ work across two public high schools located in different school districts to understand how reform simultaneously manifests differently, even within local contexts. I will introduce you to the everyday work lives of 16 teachers (11 women, 5 men) who navigate the overlapping interplay of global reform discourses and the transformation of deeply rooted local institutions and icons (the teacher) that will seem quite familiar to readers around the world. Teachers navigate global institutional changes from a local terrain. It is an uneven terrain too. Gender, in particular, binds the global-to-the-local movement of reform. As a dynamic social category that shapes how teachers

Preface  xi understand and then implement reform, masculinities and femininities provide meaning and form to street-level bureaucracy. Gender is foregrounded as an analytic concept shaping the occupation too. Men and women make meaning of policy in their struggles to earn a living. Together, a gendered view of policy and of teaching shift the focus to how policy is done and how policy leads to particular outcomes while not shifting the conceptual focus: understanding the implications of global education reform on teachers’ work. I attend to the commonalities of global presses to reform the education worker from an on-the-ground and nuanced vantage point. To understand reform of teaching we must focus on gendered policy enactment, the behind-the-scenes work done to make sense of reform and implement it during the workday. The concerns grappled with here strike an emotional chord in so many sectors of democratic societies. At the heart of concerns are changes to teachers and teaching. Changes to teachers and teaching are intimately intertwined with the education of young people within a democratic society. Never-ending neoliberal education reform touches us all, whether you live in rural areas, suburbs, or in urban centers. What parent (grandparent, guardian, etc.) of public school children has not been concerned about restructuring of public schools or curriculum or teachers in the United States (or the UK, or Chile, or Taiwan, or [fill in the blank])? The global perspective from which I present these issues appeals and is accessible to activists, policymakers, teachers’ unions, and a general readership concerned with the issue of education reform, teachers and their work, and how social categories play a role. What unites so many of us across vast distances is that we care about the responses to the question of who teaches whom, what, how, for what purpose, according to whom, and why. Here I attend to this question, sharing with you teachers’ perspectives and experiences of a changing profession, work being transformed: teaching. I encourage you to read on and to then question what is happening to the work of your local, public school teachers. I know you care to know. REFERENCES Maynard-Moody, S., & Musheno, M. (2003). Cops, teachers, counselors: Stories from the front lines of public service. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Weatherley, R., & Lipsky, M. (1977). Street-level bureaucrats and institutional innovation: Implementing special education reform. Harvard Educational Review, 47(2), 171–197.

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Introduction to Global and Local Interest in Reorganizing Teachers’ Work Comparing Stories

GENESIS I have begun this book many times, not because previous versions were incorrect or erroneously led the reader toward a different ending, but rather because the beginning of a story can vary. This version emerged out of a conversation with my then eight-year-old second daughter. We were talking about the meaning of genesis, a beginning, and she went on to show her understanding of the term by elaborating on the beginning of the world as revealed in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. It was an interesting and thorough example (and a strange one as she has never read the Bible, had it read to her, nor attended any form of religious instruction). She was particularly curious as to why Jewish and Christian people had different days of rest despite sharing the same genesis story from which the concept of a day of rest is drawn. In doing so, she reminded me how important knowing the genesis of a story can be for understanding what comes afterward, particularly how people act on their interpretation of genesis. One version of this book’s genesis begins in the middle of another story. I  was pursuing the stories within and behind Argentina’s official history textbooks. My goal was to examine gender representations over the tumultuous second half of the 20th century. I wanted to understand how the roles portrayed in a nation’s history textbooks vary over time. Since, at the time, there was no complete archive of the nation’s official textbooks sanctioned for the high school classroom, I constructed one through archival research, searches in used bookstalls, and interviews with teachers and school librarians. Most of that fieldwork transpired on the streets of Buenos Aires. So many informal and formal interactions with Porteñas/os ended with the suggestion that I go see what is happening to teachers in the Province of Buenos Aires. There, it was suggested, teachers’ work is changing. There are five points that must be elaborated to understand this version of the book’s genesis—what led me to construct the story of teachers’ work the way that I do in the pages that follow. First, the suggestion that I go see what is happening to teachers in the Province of Buenos Aires was not a onetime comment in passing. It was stated over and over again. As a qualitative

2  Introduction to Global and Local Interest researcher, prepared to conduct ethnographic research, I reached a different sort of saturation point. The saturation was not confirmation that an event or idea was more than one person’s whimsy. The changes occurring in the Province of Buenos Aires affect teaching beyond the provincial boundaries, and what is happening to teachers in the province is of concern to education professionals and to the general public. Teaching is an intimate endeavor and a variety of decisions about teaching, including who teaches what and how are considered the domain of local communities. Yet while decentralization of educational decision-making and financing occurs in national contexts, a global movement to reorganize teachers’ work thrives, negating the democratic possibilities decentralization suggests. Reform of teaching—not just teaching in the province—is as much a local concern as it is a global concern. It is an issue that merits further examination, even if seemingly distant. When I began this project in Argentina, teachers were often absent from reform texts and reform discussion. Their work was implicated in trends to privatize education, stagnant education budgets, and decentering of educational control. Similarly, initial efforts to insert market-based concepts into the education arena in other nations also did not speak of teachers as the explicit target, but emphasized tools of the market, such as Chile’s vouchers.1 This is not the case anymore. An intensified focus on teachers through teacher-aimed policies has emerged on the global stage, a “re-regulatory education reform agenda” (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin 2013, p. 3). The ground for such measures was laid over the last two decades through constant crisis modes (real and imagined) (Klein, 2008) and reform-of-reform schemes. The neoliberal model of late capitalism is constantly changing, adapting, and extracting from contexts around the world. Teachers and their work continue to be an element to control for reform to continue. I was saturated by the request to go see what is happening in the province, by the need to further explore a phenomenon. Rather than an end in and of itself, I was saturated with a need to begin a new study. Second, the textbook research participants suggested that I look at teachers’ work. They did not elaborate on the reference, nor, at the time, did I ask them to do so. I did not understand the reference, or rather the shift in perspective that they alluded to. They were not referring to, for example, a change in textbooks or curriculum accompanying the shift from national to local educational control. They asked me to look beyond the myopic view of teaching as limited to what transpires when teachers are in front of their students in the classroom. They asked me to look at reform of an occupation. Instead they gently—too gently—nudged me to examine how the occupation was being systematically transformed vis-à-vis reform after reform ushered in under the guise of improving education. I needed to read between the lines or seek out the story not getting attention. There was scant mention of the way teaching work might be affected by such reform as new teacher certifications in new, privately managed teacher education institutes, to new dividing lines between primary and

Introduction to Global and Local Interest  3 secondary schools in reform language. The educators and other Argentines who referred me to teachers’ work in the Province of Buenos Aires were already doing this, watching facets of their colleagues’ work change. The teachers also saw a re-signification of the meaning of “the teacher” as the occupational structure was transformed. The identity and role of “the teacher” is at play when nations restructure education although oftentimes both that identity and teachers are not a part of the decision-making and agenda-setting process. I have come to interpret the teachers’ suggestion to go see how work is changing as a call to reassess the focus and motivation for control in education and take into account teachers’ roles in education reform. One potentially productive means to do so is through empirical examinations guided by a revised labor process theory; revised to respect the important adjustments made to Braverman’s (1974) original, overly deterministic account of the relationship between employers to employees. My focus is on public school teachers, not on work done in the market. Previous examinations of teachers’ work suggest a much closer relationship between public and private sector labor and the fruitfulness of Braverman’s work for understanding change to teaching work in a variety of contexts (Ozga & Lawn, 1981; Robertson, 2000; Smyth, 2001; Stevenson, 2007). Neoliberalism inserts market-based concepts into the education arena. Neoliberal reformers call for greater capitalist/private financing of and decision-making in public education. Furthermore, the continued demand for public education to be aligned with the demands of private-sector labor markets all suggest that excluding public school teachers as a category of workers whose work cannot be understood through labor process theory should be reconsidered. Central to neoliberal reform is the need to control teachers because their labor is crucial to future capitalist production. Third, while teachers were concerned enough for the changes taking place to teaching work in the Province, national reforms were not happening in all parts of the nation. Teaching and the symbolic teacher were being transformed differently even across short distances. The Province of Buenos Aires surrounds the City of Buenos Aires. The City teachers spoke of education reform as something occurring in someone else’s backyard. In a nation with a long history of centralized education control, where everything from teacher preparation to base pay to curriculum was centralized, the suggested distance from their experiences begged further exploration particularly because it was situated in a tense relationship with the call to go see teachers working in the province. What happens locally is deeply implicated in what is happening in communities on the other side of the provincial boundary and the world. In a sense the City teachers alluded to this as they redirected me. This is the nature of policy-making in the current age of globalization: commonalities can be traced across vast distances and vastly different national contexts, but uniquely press into local communities in ways that reveal global trends. Fourth, the teachers were asking me to look at reform, big reforms with global cachet from local perspectives. They were not suggesting that I turn

4  Introduction to Global and Local Interest to the Internet and read what the World Bank had to say about Argentina’s reform or even what the national government was writing. Rather, they were suggesting that I take a look at what reform meant and looked like on the ground, from teachers’ perspectives. They suggested that I go see what reform is doing to teachers’ work. Public policy analysis is undertaken using a variety of social and behavioral science methodologies. While historical treatments of public policy exist, the teachers were asking me to step well beyond my preparation in the humanities, in history, to understanding from a social science perspective what educational reforms meant and became in the everyday work lives of teachers. I had discovered earlier that teachers’ perspectives on educational reform were woefully lacking in Argentina’s print media (Robert, 2012). Furthermore, I felt it was a perspective that needed attention in the educational policy literature knowing that teachers are street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010): They exercise discretion in the process of reconfiguring boundaries around their work and professional identities. While nations and the transnational organizations that advocate for neoliberal education reform pushed to measure changes on the ground through quantitative means and via loosely defined concepts of quality and accountability, teachers advocated for a different approach to understanding and measuring the reform of public education. They suggested that the definition of the problem needed to be revisited from teachers’ perspectives. I ethnographically examine teachers’ street-level view of policy demands and the transformation into everyday practice. Teachers’ negotiations of policies are treated as “kinds of ‘boundary work’ that enable and disable professionalizing projects” (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 4). Exploring teachers’ boundary work reveals misalignments of global reform discourses about what teachers are to become (technocrats, more professional, more intently focused on—and held accountable for—learning) and “the teacher” symbolically evoked and embodied within the reform context. This misalignment creates a “dilemma-driven educational workplace” (p. 4) for teachers attempting to cling to work educating students in curricular knowledge, but knowing that they must attend, for example, to students as caregivers as the state retracts from serving communities. If they do not perform the care work and bureaucratic work demanded of them, they cannot turn to the work they aim to do: teaching. Fifth, there was a story not mentioned by the teachers who, with few exceptions, were women. Gender—masculine and feminine patterns of relations, identities, roles, and practices—was not a concern raised explicitly. However, teaching in Argentina, as in many parts of the world, is done mostly by women (feminine) and is considered women’s work (feminized). The characterization of teaching as women’s work/feminized, performed mostly by women, perhaps renders the work invisible. The classification as a job that earns a wage, an occupation, or as a profession, even, must be stated and restated. I argue here that teachers engage in gendered “boundary

Introduction to Global and Local Interest  5 work” to redefine their labor practices and profession. Teachers involve gender in the re-articulation of their work as they negotiate the changing terrain of education. NEOLIBERALISM I mention neoliberalism, a term used around the world for decades, and one that is becoming part of everyday parlance in the United States. Sometimes it has been used interchangeably with globalization, a false comparison that misses the mark. Often it is not defined. By neoliberal (neoliberalism, etc.) I am referring to the blending of liberal theories asserting individual autonomy and agency free from contextual constraints with neoclassical economic theories that claim markets—and the individuals that form them—function above and beyond political and social life. For an accessible and historically linked definition of neoliberalism Robertson (2008) provides citations to classical social and economic theories (e.g., Locke, Hayek, Polanyi, Stiglitz) from which neoliberalism evolved, as well as its evolution in the education arena. Neoliberal education reform is an ideology, a set of values and beliefs, concerned with freeing the rational economic subject whose choices and ability to make decisions about education are currently constrained in the absence of a free-market-organized educational system. There are several elements of neoliberal education reform that are of importance to this study’s focus on teachers’ work. Neoliberalism is concerned with unleashing the potential of the neoliberal subject. Specifically, neoliberal reforms aim to free the neoliberal subject to engage in rational economic decision-making. However, there is something problematic about the rational economic decision-making envisioned by proponents of neoliberalism beyond the concept of what constitutes “rational” decision-making in the first place. This is how decision-making processes (and the individuals engaged in them) are extracted from contexts, free of sociocultural constraints and power differentials. In this way, neoliberal theories are perhaps utopian and highly abstract, while educational systems are not utopian, nor are the institutions or the persons who work within them abstract. Teachers work in contexts in which they are advantaged and disadvantaged. Their decisions are not made in isolation from the historical and sociocultural contexts where they fulfill many different roles beyond that of teacher: mothers/fathers, partners/spouses, to name a few. Privatizing teacher education, for example, may free neoliberal subjects to make decisions about entering the profession (if they have the money to pay). Those decisions are quite rational: I need a job, and teacher education is a path to a job. However, they are also complex decisions that involve issues of identity that constrain where a teacher will go to study and whether the teacher can overcome constraints of finances, time, and transportation to access the teacher education institution. The decision to seek

6  Introduction to Global and Local Interest employment as a teacher is itself informed by perceived opportunity, which may be constrained by gendered perceptions of labor, of what work is done by women and by men. Personal interests and professional opportunity, social class, the availability of continued education, for example, all play into the decision-making process. One of the implications of this study is that neoliberalism indeed commands the rational economic decisionmaking of teachers. Tracing out the decision-making process promises insight into what support teachers need to educate youth. The neoliberal subject is also depicted as technocratic, self-governing, and accountable to the logic of markets. Yet the teachers in this study did “not work for those who paid their wages; they worked for the children they taught. Concerns for care and connectedness come to the fore here” (Casey & Apple, 1989, p. 182). The teachers addressed students’ needs with hours of their lives beyond public perceptions and reform discourses about teaching. While potentially a case of Lingard’s “vernaculars” (2000), nevertheless the vernacular of a gendered teacher performing care work is deployed in a multitude of national contexts on a daily basis. There are contradictory currents to ideologies of neoliberalism in teachers’ boundary work. For one, looking within boundary work can help account for gender, for agency, and for politics, and make what is often absent present. “The social world of schooling and the work and identities of those who inhabit that social space” (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 11) is the focus of this critique of neoliberal education reform. Neoliberalism is often discussed as new. Yet it is a repackaging of previous abstract theories and some policy attempts at materializing those theories. Neoliberalism must be historicized. One of the surprising implications of this study is that policies that are being branded as new and innovative are not. Rather, there are policies found in archives, renewed, and/or reclaimed, repackaged as silver bullets to solve the so-called achievement problem and equal educational opportunity despite not having been proved to work or being laid on the shelf by previous generations. What do we know about previous attempts to transform education using elements of neoliberal ideology? We must unearth them; we must examine them and bring them to the fore. How have incentives by another name been used in the past? With what “success”? Policies, this suggests, are neither static nor one-time decisions, and they are not absolute. Rather, policies emerge and recede and in either trajectory, policy makers, teachers, and others enact policies with the power to sway educational decision-making. RESEARCH DESIGN I provide a street-level view of teachers’ decision-making from the beginning of professional education through maintaining a teaching job. Based on ethnographic research undertaken at two public high schools in Argentina the

Introduction to Global and Local Interest  7 methods framed 16 teachers as street-level bureaucrats who approached doing policy as gendered persons confronting gendered policy, negotiating the shifting boundaries around their profession. In what ways did masculinities and femininities shape teachers’ decision-making about how or whether to negotiate the meaning and then practice of a policy? Interviews and observations across the years reveal definitions of policy and what it means to be a teacher-worker in the reform context. Observations of “typical” workdays, professional development workshops, and job fairs illuminate the complex process through which policy impacts the work of teaching far beyond the classroom. Early in the 2005 school year, teachers told me to: “Come see how we work!” Teachers invited me to visit their classrooms, but they also implored me to follow them beyond the classroom (for example, to a public job fair) to learn how they secured work. It was this early foray outside the classroom that illuminated something I had not been prepared to notice: the impact of reform on teachers as workers. In the years that followed, I joined them in the classes that they took to keep their credentials current. I studied how they negotiated ever-changing demands for curricular expertise with their own demands to maintain professional identity, prestige, and status. I saw them struggling with a question that their work lives made unavoidable for them: for what kind of society were they educating youth? Without an answer from the state or from international nongovernmental organizations, they were left to reconcile the goals of reform and how to provide an education within the ever-evolving reform context. One of the complexities encountered early on when designing this study was where to situate my observations. The set of policies that are examined from the ground level are global policies, ideas circulating amongst nations regardless of economic positioning, regional location, and cultural identities/language. The North-South divide and the Western-Eastern divide are irrelevant to neoliberal reform. Neoliberal education reform is happening. Everywhere. Argentina was one of many locations where teachers were navigating ongoing reform of their work and workplace. With dramatic school reforms, move toward a market-based economy, highly literate society, and well-established system of public education, Argentina is a rich context in which to explore neoliberal reform. Reforms were not as market-oriented as in the case of Chile (privatization), nor accountability-driven as in the United States, nor locally managed as in the UK, all of which have affected teachers significantly. Instead, Argentina has reformed and re-reformed its school system over the past fifteen years, neither wholeheartedly embracing neoliberal education principles nor rejecting them unequivocally; it is a bit chaotic, with elements reflecting all of the contexts mentioned. Argentina’s educational system is also not easily categorized as that of so-called developing or developed nations; it reflects attributes of education within both economic settings with literacy rates for youth at nearly 100% (UNESCO, 2002/2012). Yet poverty rates have risen in the aftermath of the 1990s

8  Introduction to Global and Local Interest structural adjustment programs and several economic crises. This strangely familiar context potentially offered a combined comfort/discomfort level from which to critique neoliberal education reform of teaching work. Metropolitan Buenos Aires includes the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and areas in the Province of Buenos Aires, some of the wealthiest areas in the nation and some of the poorest. Some areas of Metropolitan Buenos Aires represent a “global city” (Sassen, 2002) in the Southern Hemisphere with education, labor, and economic markers characteristic of developed and Northern nations, although situated in a so-called developing nation. There is an educated workforce and substantial financial infrastructure. As with most global cities, however, Metropolitan Buenos Aires also contains multi-generational poverty characterized by a lack of access to state services, infrastructure, persistent unemployment and underemployment. There are haves and have-nots. Decentralization of education to local government means that the transformation of teachers’ work may vary dramatically within this already varied national context. Thus teachers’ work was compared/contrasted across two intranational locations that enacted neoliberal education reform quite differently: the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (referred to as the City) did not implement initial reforms and the Province of Buenos Aires (referred to as the Province) embraced them all. I selected two high schools, one located in the City and one in the Province. Teachers work in schools. However, due to the division of teaching work by hours, teachers may work in as many as 10 schools, teaching a class or two in a high school and then traveling to another to do the same. The teachers who participated in this study all had work in one of the two focus schools referred to as Jacaranda (City) and Pampas (Province) and also worked in other schools. The two high schools were identified by educational researchers and history teachers as exceptional or anomalies. Ingersoll (2003) writes about the importance of focusing on such instances: Thomas Kuhn persuasively writes in his seminal study of the progress of science that it is by focusing on the anomaly and the exceptional that a particular theoretical perspective, or paradigm, is best able to advance. . . . anomalies in any given paradigm are resistant to solution because they are a product of the paradigm itself. They are the perennial and self-induced blind spots. Hence it is only through a close examination of the previously unexamined assumptions of a theoretical perspective that investigations can advance. (p. 16) I came to understand the exceptionalism in multiple ways. First, the directors had strong and clear ideas about the purpose of public education in a democratic society striving for some sort of equality. They vocally defend public education and the teachers and students who are a part of it, sometimes having to defend their school and fight off mandates that would

Introduction to Global and Local Interest  9 affect their school plan, school culture. It should not be misconstrued that the directors never have or do not find fault with teachers or students and it most certainly does not mean that they were viewed as, acted as, or identified as superman or wonder woman on a one-person mission of salvation. On the contrary, they were quick to point out that teachers are not homogenous, nor are the populations of public schools. They voiced concern over the need to constantly be active listeners, attentive and open to the needs and demands of those who they serve. They were street-level bureaucrats but not passive receivers and transmitters of policies. Instead they filtered new demands on their schools in relation to their overarching school missions and sought out policies to support the mission when none were offered. At the City School, referred to as Jacaranda, only women teach history, with five teachers working full-time and one part-time teacher/school director. They all identify as middle class, and were between the ages of 37 and 60, all studied at what are considered the most prestigious teacher education institutes, and had between 16 and 28 years of experience. Only the director and one of the teachers taught one class at another institution. Otherwise, their professional work was centered at Jacaranda. In the data-driven chapters, the differences in the way teaching work is organized become readily apparent. The City did not adopt national education reforms; they opted out, citing the neoliberal reform ideal that control should be decentralized to local levels. It requires no effort on my behalf to distinguish the differences in the organization of Jacaranda teachers’ work from that of their colleagues 30 kilometers away in the Province of Buenos Aires. Pampas is located in the Province of Buenos Aires, and its teachers did experience educational reform as suggested by the national educational policy. In fact, the Province of Buenos Aires government adopted every facet of the proposed policies with little-to-no piloting of suggestions, or seemingly assessing the logistics that following through on the policy required, such as tens of thousands of students and teachers that had to move from secondary to elementary schools. All 10 Pampas social studies teachers participated in the study; it was a mix of five women and five men plus a director who was not a social studies teacher. The teachers identified as working class (five men) and middle class (five women and one man). They attended a mix of professional schools, with the women attending the most prestigious programs and all the men attending what they referred to as teacher mills, a mix of newly reformed public and newly minted private teacher institutes. They ranged in age from 26 to 48. The number of years of teaching experience ranged from 5 to 18. Women and men were at both ends of the range; some men were new to the profession; some women were new. They all worked at more than one school with the least number of schools worked being two and the most being 11. This is related to the restructuring of teaching work that, at least at the moment reforms were instituted leads to more “flexible” work days for teachers in

10  Introduction to Global and Local Interest policy parlance, or in teachers’ words: to spread out the amount of work available to as many persons as possible. Unlike Connell’s teachers (1985), those who are quoted and discussed in my study are individuals rather than composites. There are 16 teachers who participated in this study plus additional educators, administrators, parents, education researchers, and ministry officials. Pseudonyms are used but they are linked to “real teachers.” All teachers who participated in this study were history teachers. Four had social studies certification, but all referred to themselves as history teachers or profesoras/profesores de historia. (The term profesora/o is important to understanding teachers’ navigation of reform boundaries discussed in Chapter 3.) I approached history teachers because I was a social studies/history teacher. I also was well versed in Argentina’s secondary high school history curriculum. Centering on one subject area offered the possibility of examining in depth teacher education reform, job prospects/job market, curricular reforms, and identity as related to teaching knowledge. Women and men participated. Genders work not in isolation, but relationally: masculinities to femininities and hegemonic masculinities to nondominant masculinities, for example. While women are in the majority of high school classrooms, men do teach, and are history teachers. Furthermore, to understand the ways that gender works as a process shaping the transformation of teaching, it would be foolish not to compare and contrast the policy enactment of women and men. TEACHERS’ GENDERED ENACTMENT OF NEOLIBERAL POLICY Chapter 1, Transforming teachers’ gendered work in and out of the classroom, presents an overview of the theoretical framework used to analyze the ethnographic data. It was not the initial framework. You can find echoes of this book in my dissertation, but they are faint. For while I examined teachers’ work using theories of gender policy regimes; what was revealed was a sketch of the five interactive gendering processes articulated by Joan Acker (1990). Exploring evidence of a gendered policy regime in the neoliberal reform of Argentina’s public schools revealed each and every facet of Acker’s process and each facet had clear links or anchors to neoliberal education reform discourse. Finding Acker’s framework to help understand why teachers enact policy the way they do reminded me of the genesis of this project: to go pay attention to how teachers work. The framework also did not ask me to sidestep how gender was involved, but rather to situate masculinities and femininities as central to how teachers’ work was produced and being transformed. Yet, I  was still unsatisfied that the framework provided a view of the reform process that took into account the power dynamics that a global reform movement involves. This was not because Acker’s framework limited my ability to understand the interplay of gender as a structural and

Introduction to Global and Local Interest  11 agentic dynamic in and of itself. Rather, it was because the teachers engaged in politics that, while shaped by gender, were also emblematic of broader issues of education control. Alan Reid’s (2003) call to rethink labor process theory in the neoliberal era reminded me of the robust literature that emerged from the UK in the 1980s. Ozga and Lawn’s (1981) examinations of state transformations and the implications for teachers’ work brought to the fore a need to pose questions about the control of teachers’ work, not only to provide more nuance to the gendering occupational process that continued with education reform, but also to understand the broader ideological goals that undergird the reform movement. Ingersoll (2003) captures this important concern by titling his book: Who controls teachers’ work? but he does not—because it was not his focus—conduct his research from the standpoint that gender is involved in the transformation of teachers’ work in important ways that shape who controls that work and shape teachers’ roles in the process. While understanding power dynamics has been my preoccupation when attempting to understand control of the official curriculum, I had forgotten that language when the data was first analyzed. Intertwining the gendering process of occupations and labor process is the theoretical framework applied to teachers’ perspectives of educational reform of their work. Each data-driven chapter addresses a different area of teachers’ work targeted for neoliberal education reform: • teacher education programs and the labor market • curriculum and school structures • salary and incentives • extracurricular work caring for students and their families The teachers in this study felt that their profession and public schools were, as Compton and Weiner (2011) suggest, under assault, as seemingly every facet of their profession was—as this study revealed—under assault. Each chapter raises and responds to questions of control of teachers’ work and reveals the negotiation of that control from teachers’ gendered perspectives and experiences while enacting neoliberal policies. Teachers were wrestling for control of their jobs, their identities, their professional knowledge, and masculinities and femininities were at play. MAP OF THE BOOK CONTINUED Chapter 2 traces out the professional preparation of the teachers and how they got their jobs. Both of these beginning steps toward the classroom are shaped by educational reforms that aim to ensure that “qualified” and “quality” teachers find work. While these terms and conditions are sorted out by governments and researchers, there are gendered notions of who

12  Introduction to Global and Local Interest teaches what, with what preparation, and for what purpose that shape the path toward teacher preparation programs and, afterward, gainful employment. This is evident in the number of teachers teaching in particular geographic areas, grade levels, and subject areas, which is the focus of the first section of the chapter. This also is evident in teachers’ narratives about their teacher preparation: where they attended—traditional teacher preparation programs or “teacher mills”—and what they studied or what credentials they have—teaching history or social studies, for example. The final section of the chapter explores newer teachers’ struggles to secure work hours contrasted against experienced teachers’ job security. All three sections reveal the contradictory ways that gender undergirds reform of teacher preparation and licensure in two school districts. Reforms equate to more teacher education programs to choose from, long lists of required credentials, and an elaborate maze that prospective teachers run through in order to get into a classroom. Furthermore, women and men have differing approaches and deploy femininities and masculinities linked to teaching work and the symbolic image of “the teacher” to navigate teacher preparation and the labor market. Chapter 3, Navigating new curriculum and school structures, examines the fallout when the state recommends combining history with geography, civics, sociology, anthropology, and several other social science or humanities courses. The change to curriculum accompanies a change in the dividing line between elementary education and secondary education; the first two of five years of high school are shifted to elementary schools. While the curricular reforms reflect century-old pushes and pulls regarding whether teachers should be generalists or specialists, receive different preparation/ teach different content, the findings show the tensions amongst teachers that emerged when local governments were able to decide whether or not to apply these dramatic reforms. The City of Buenos Aires opted not to change the curriculum or school structure. Teachers’ responses reflect the adversarial nature of the reform, an assault on teaching identity, with additional implications for where they would work. Conversely, the findings from the Province of Buenos Aires show how teachers struggled with the introduction of the generalist into the labor market. This chapter discusses teachers’ identity in terms of the images associated with various professional titles and the symbolic meaning attributed to forms of curricular knowledge. Gendered language is deployed to identify and locate teachers and the knowledge they possess in the elementary and secondary school hierarchy, and gender is central to understanding teachers’ reactions to curricular and structural reforms and teacher participants’ negotiation of these changes. Incentives and merit pay have been initiated around the world to get teachers to work where they currently are not working, teach to a test or standardized curriculum, and even to show up for work. Chapter 4 examines the incentives and salary bonuses teachers received. I look at how

Introduction to Global and Local Interest  13 they decided whether and how to increase their incomes and what conditions shaped their decision-making process. Masculinities and femininities mediated teachers’ approach to taking up incentives to work in ­particular schools. Gender also plays a role in teachers’ decisions to take on n ­ onteaching schoolwork to receive bonus pay. Rather than a simplistic, ­one-time-only decision, incentive and bonus pay schemes involve women and men in “rational economic decision-making”—the policy logic behind such programs—mired by gender. Additionally, the programs exert a new form of control on teachers shaping who works where, doing what, for what purpose and for whom, and for what long and short-term benefits. Chapter 5 examines the extracurricular work in and for an unequal society that teachers perform every day. Each workday required additional extracurricular labor of teachers. Some were written into work rules, such as lesson plan submission and public job talks. These changes increased surveillance of their teaching while also increasing their out-of-classroom responsibilities. Other extra, noninstructional work required teachers to support students and their families emotionally and financially in light of an ongoing economic crisis and dramatic cuts in state social services. Both the written and unwritten changes in the organizational logic of schools ushered in contradictory gendered roles and responsibilities. On the one hand, teachers were being cared for or watched over more closely. On the other hand, the changes involved teachers in caregiving and providing for school communities in addition to instruction. The reforms were ambiguous about the aim of this extra work. As a result, teachers struggled with a question that their own troubled work lives made unavoidable: For what kind of society were they educating youth? What was their role as educators within that society? Without an answer from the state or from international nongovernmental organizations, they were left to reconcile the goals of reform while providing students with an education. The teachers’ responses to these questions were shaped by the gendered nature of the extracurricular work. Teachers enact policy on a day-to-day basis from initiation into the occupation and for many years afterward. Their decisions are made in and out of the classroom because reforms aim to transform every facet of the occupation from preparation to pay. Reforms cover vast swaths of the occupational terrain, but never escape the grasp of masculinities and femininities. Gender has implications for educational reform and its analysis. Based on the findings from the data-driven chapters, the conclusion is also a beginning: I begin to elaborate the conceptual attributes of policy protagonism that emerged from the data and its analysis. The aim is to bring attention to teachers’ policy work beyond just receiving policies, but rather to recast their policy enactment as instantiations of policy protagonism. Building from and moving beyond street-level bureaucracy, policy protagonism demands and feeds an inclusive educational policymaking process and more savvy educational policy analyses. No reform can be successful

14  Introduction to Global and Local Interest without incorporating teachers as policy protagonists whose experiences can be a source of new knowledge rather than an obstacle to be managed. Teachers, I conclude, are savvy policy protagonists who critically analyze reform and engage in the transformation of their profession from unequal gendered positions. If educational policy makers are to improve educational reform outcomes, they will need to heed teachers’ street-level views and incorporate them into decision-making. Furthermore, if we are to improve educational reform outcomes, teachers must not only act as policy protagonists, they must embrace it, own it. PRESENT TENSE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH The ethnographic data for this study is shared in the present tense. This requires an explanation. I contemplated whether to write in the ethnographic present. This is a long-standing convention in anthropology (and some qualitative sociology) where practitioners write about their fieldwork data in the present tense. The convention is not without critique, nor is it absolute. Initially all of my data was written up in past tense. It seemed most accurate, prudent, and respectful. The research was conducted over a series of years spanning a decade (2003–2015). I also was writing about the teachers’ lives and about educational reform that occurred in the past. The teachers and their schools have not remained static, frozen in time, or immune to change. Furthermore, the issue of neoliberal education reform in Argentina represented change in teachers’ work, change in the nature of public education, and lastly, a change in the “plan país” or long-term trajectory for the nation. The research project did not aim to highlight cultural continuity or document enduring social and cultural qualities. The focus was reform. Change. Unless continuity was indeed a finding—and in some respects continuity emerged from the data (discussed in coming chapters)—the purpose was to understand whether and how teachers’ work was changing in the reform context. Thus I wrote in the past tense to historicize, situate the teachers’ work lives in the past. I also wrote in the past tense to suggest the potential for change. This is how teachers’ work lives were. What might they be five years later? Ten years later? The persistence of change has been borne out. The Jacaranda teachers’ work lives, for example, have changed dramatically the last five years. Pampas teachers pay, to include one example, once again includes incentive bonuses, which were suspended for over five years after the December 2001 economic crisis. Finally, one of the reasons I chose Argentina as a research site for an ethnography of neoliberal education reform was that the process began before it was initiated in some developed and Northern contexts. What might be learned from this developing and Southern Hemisphere/non-English-speaking context about neoliberal education reform to

Introduction to Global and Local Interest  15 affect current neoliberal education reform in those seemingly polar-opposite contexts? I chose to write in the ethnographic present in the pages to follow. The key to my rationale is the word “process.” As Seddon, Ozga, and Levin (2013) remind us, “these neo-liberal policy trajectories shifted over time in response to their intended and unintended economic and social consequences, but their underpinning social logic was consolidated through a process of permanent change” (p. 6). Global reform of education is ongoing. Argentina is no exception. The teachers talked of reform and reformof-reform during the fieldwork. They talked of reform “patches.” Global neoliberal education reform may begin in a context at different moments and morph in relation to the historical and sociocultural and economic context. They are processes. In addition, I rewrote the manuscript in the present tense to open up the possibility for readers to engage with the Argentine experience, to feel a sense of immediacy, making connections with their lived experience in a variety of contexts where neoliberalism’s trajectory continues. Rather than confuse or misrepresent the very real timeframes in which ethnography requires, I invite you to feel a sense of urgency and to feel it in your present context, where ever that may be. NOTE 1. Chile aggressively implemented neoliberal education reform. Vouchers are provided to parents to “choose” where they wish to send their children to school. The effort has done little to address educational inequality but has created a private educational system that benefits from public monies with little oversight of the quality of education provided.

REFERENCES Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4(2), 139–158. Braverman, H. (1974). Labour and monopoly capital. London, England: Monthly Review Press. Casey, K., & Apple, M. W. (1989). Gender and the Conditions of Teachers’ Work: The Development of Understanding in America. In, S. Acker (Ed.) Teachers, Gender & Careers (pp. 171–186). Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press. Connell, R. W. (1985). Teachers’ work. North Sydney, Australia: George Allen & Unwin. Ingersoll, R. M. (2003). Who controls teachers’ work?: Power and accountability in America’s schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Klein, N. (2008). The shock doctrine. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Lingard, B. (2000). It is and it isn’t: Vernacular globalization, educational policy and restructuring. In, N. C. Burbules and C. A. Torres (Eds.), Globalization and education: Critical perspectives (pp. 79–108). New York, NY: Routledge.

16  Introduction to Global and Local Interest Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service, 30th anniversary expanded ed. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Ozga, J. & Lawn, M. (1981). Teachers, professionalism, and class: A study of organized teachers. London, England: Falmer. Reid, A. (2003). Understanding teachers’ work: Is there still a place for labour process theory? British Journal of Sociology of Education 2(5), pp. 559–573. Robert, S. A. (2012). (En)gendering responsibility. A critical news analysis of Argentina’s education reform, 2001–02. DISCOURSE: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(4), 485–498. Robertson, S. (2000). A class act: Changing teachers work, the state, and globalization. London: Routledge. Robertson, S. L. (2008). “Remaking the world:” Neoliberalism and the transformation of education and teachers’ labor. In M. Compton and L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers, and their unions (pp. 11–27). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Sassen, S. (2002). Global networks, linked cities. New York, NY: Routledge. Seddon, T., with J. Ozga, and J. S. Levin. (2013). Global transitions and teacher professionalism. In T. Seddon and J. S. Levin (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2013: Educators, professionalism and politics: Global transitions, national spaces, and professional projects (pp. 3–24). New York, NY: Routledge. Smyth, J. (2001). Critical politics of teachers’ work: An Australian perspective. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Stevenson, H. (2007). Restructuring teachers’ work and trade union responses in England: Bargaining for change? American Educational Research Journal 44(2), pp. 224–251. UNESCO. (2002/2012). Youth literacy rate, population 15–24 years, both sexes (%). Retrieved from: http://data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EDULIT-_ DS&popupcustomis=true&lang=en

1 Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments

INTRODUCTION This chapter explains the theoretical framework woven from the fields of gender, work, and organizations, gender policy analysis, and labor process theory. I  situate teachers as workers at the center of educational change. I elaborate the reform process as a collusion of the gendered nature of work and the gendered nature of policy whose outcomes are best understood by exploring how teachers put policy into practice in and out of the classroom. Through gendered policy enactments, teachers negotiate the forms and purposes of control over their work and public education. INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I discuss the theoretical standpoints from which I construct the study and analyze the data. I continue to build the concepts of gender, work, and neoliberal education reform that provide a vista from which to examine the transformation of teachers’ work on the ground. I isolate and critique the ways that gender is involved in teachers’ policy enactment. By policy enactment, I refer to Ball, Maguire, and Braun’s (2012) elaboration: sets of education policies are ‘made sense of,’ mediated and struggled over, and sometimes ignored, or, in another word, enacted in schools. Enactments are collective and collaborative, but not just simply in the arm fuzzy sense of teamwork, although that is there, but also in the interaction and inter-connection between diverse actors, texts, talk, technology and objects (artefacts) which constitute ongoing responses to policy. (p. 3) In the pages that follow are findings that detail how teachers produce meaning for policies and then transform that meaning into policy practices, or reasons why they do not. I found this to be the most productive way to understand how teachers do policy in their everyday work lives and to, literally, “find” it in data.

18  Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments I also complicate enactment to reflect the literature on the gendered nature of work, of workers, and of educational policy. Neoliberal education policy is enacted in contexts where advantage and disadvantage exists. Teachers’ enactment is constrained or buttressed by this uneven terrain. Understanding how enactment shapes and is shaped by gender requires framing teaching work and policy within historical and sociocultural contexts and constructions of feminine and feminized work. What is revealed as a result of conceptualizing teachers’ gendered policy engagements is in the four data-driven chapters that follow. GENDERED WORK AND WORKERS Whether instructing or doing a multitude of other tasks that support the classroom, teachers work within a labor market that is “a socially constructed and politically mediated structure of conflict and accommodation among contending forces” (Peck, 1996, p. 4–5, author’s emphasis). Furthermore, teachers as public employees are at the center of political controversy as that labor market and their place of work remain the focus of neoliberal reform efforts. In the United States, for example, there has been an increase in teacher-aimed reforms focused specifically on teacher workforce issues (Superfine, Gottlieb, & Smylie, 2012). Controlling teachers and their work is a priority, seemingly the priority, of neoliberal reform agendas du jour. RENEWING LABOR PROCESS THEORY Neoliberalism in education may be surrounded by discourses of changing education. This often overshadows the way that reforms change the organizational structure of the workplace and the occupations that work within it. More importantly, what is overlooked is the way that neoliberalism transforms control of education and education workers, as well as the purpose of education. Central to labor or industrial studies are the inherent tensions within capitalism over control of the meaning and forms of work. Alan Reid (2003) urges educational researchers to revisit labor process theory as a productive means of seeking answers to questions concerning control and purpose behind global calls to reform schools. He outlines a brief history of labor process theory, its application to education, and the debates over and corrections to labor process theory based on those debates. He argues persuasively for a renewed application to understanding changes to teachers’ work. As reform of education continues unabated, this call to renewal is timely. Labor process theory can help to place the specificities of local practice in relationship to the imperatives for control that are stitched into the

Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments  19 fabric of the structures and practices of education systems. In this way, labor process theory can offer powerful insights into what is happening to teachers’ work. (p. 571) Attending to the correctives to labor process theory, researchers must find a means to overcome a singular focus on control and its effect. Applying an ethnographic lens to large-scale reform while focusing on teachers’ gendered policy enactments complicates policy analysis, bringing context and practice into view. More importantly, this study suggests a need to question the meanings and discourses surrounding neoliberal reform. As will be revealed in the chapters that follow, teachers’ policy enactments raise questions regarding the very nature of reform objectives. The neoliberal teacher-subject idealized in reform is an “abstract categor[y] that [has] no occupants, no human bodies, no gender” (Acker, 1990, p. 149). Yet the “hypothetical worker” imagined to fill this disembodied category is male, free from the “legitimate obligations” (p. 149) associated with women (i.e., child bearing and raising) and better suited to work in a capitalist structure. As Acker states: Rational-technical, ostensibly gender-neutral control systems are built upon and conceal a gendered substructure (Smith 1988) in which men’s bodies fill the abstract jobs. Use of such abstract systems continually reproduces the underlying gender assumptions and the subordinated or excluded place of women. (p. 154) The hypothetical teacher, however, has traditionally been a woman. The work structure, including pay, responsibilities, and educational preparation has been constructed around legitimate obligations associated with women in Argentina and elsewhere in the world (Apple, 1986; Biklen, 1995; Cortina & San Román, 2006). For more than a century, more women have been teachers (feminine). The work they perform also is considered women’s work (Morgade & Bellucci, 1997). As such it is revered less, paid less, and subject to intense scrutiny (feminized). Take, for example, the fact that teachers’ salaries continue to lag behind inflation. Education, unlike other economic sectors, has slowly recuperated a fraction of salaries lost during periods of structural adjustment in the last decades of the 20th century. Dirié and Oiberman (1999) found in their analysis of teachers’ salaries between 1980 and 1990 that industrial work salaries decreased by 14 percent, while elementary and secondary teachers lost 40 percent of their salary (p. 19). This is a phenomenon that some of the most prominent educational researchers have questioned, considering that schooling remains, at least rhetorically, the foundation for improving Argentina’s economic growth and democracy. How can teachers and their collective organizations have failed to gain salary and benefits while almost all other sectors have, including those that do not figure prominently

20  Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments into the nation’s political, economic, and social plans to globalize (see Tiramonti, 2001)? The feminine and feminized nature of teaching is nuanced and merits dissection. It perhaps provides a plausible explanation to Tiramonti’s question. Men are in the minority, but they have entered the teaching profession, potentially challenging the symbolic image of the teacher-mother and the feminized quality of work performed (Fischman, 2000). While teaching continues to be performed largely by women and to be considered women’s work, referring to teaching as feminized does not equate to an understanding of how feminization is produced. I adapted Acker’s five interactive gendering processes to women and men teachers’ understandings and experiences of neoliberal education reform as a productive means to probe how the gendering process of the teaching occupation colludes with attempts to reform that work. The five processes are: 1. Construction of divisions along lines of gender 2. Construction of symbols and images 3. Patterned interactions of women and men, women and women, men and men that enact dominance and submission 4. Production of gendered components of individual identity 5. Creation of and conceptualization of social structures into an organizational logic. Several studies suggest how historical and contemporary social, economic, and political state agendas define representations of the teacher in gendered ways (Fischman, 2007; Silver, 2007). Connell (2005) describes neoliberal ideology as bringing about not only a masculinization, but also a “gradual recomposition of gender orders” (p. 1804). That recomposition is apparent beyond Argentina, and in complex ways. Silver’s (2007) study of Puerto Rican teachers in the context of neoliberalism found to a certain extent a “remasculinized” (p. 279) image of teachers: a sense that the field was opening to men, and a move away from previous rhetoric of teachers as “professional mom[s]” (p. 275). I interrogate how gender is embedded in the foundational concept of the rational and instrumental actor and decisionmaking on which neoliberalism is based that potentially recomposes the gender order surrounding teaching. Knowing that neoliberal reforms target the teacher workforce and knowing that occupations undergo an ongoing, interactive process of re-gendering, how does neoliberalism transform the continual gendering process through which the meaning and nature of teaching is resignified by both women and men? GENDERED POLICY ENACTMENT Reforming women and men teachers is the most significant hurdle to opening up a “new” political and economic market. Conceptualizing teaching as

Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments  21 gendered takes theorizations of teaching work deeper within a re-regulatory context (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 6). This is an important corrective to global education reform literature. Too often studies have generalized educational change in local spaces without teasing out “how” and “why” globalizing forces affect local education in varied ways. The intersecting effects of territorializing and boundarying practices cannot be assumed on the basis of generic commentaries about globalization, accounts of travelling education reforms or commentaries on teacher professionalism. Rather, understanding these globalizing effects requires analysis of particular spaces to reveal how the disaggregated effects of travelling reform, historical context and patterns of boundarying play out in specific places. (p. 14) Gender, I  suggest, is a useful analytic concept for understanding how policies work. Policy is not neutral or natural; gender mediates policies of detracking (Datnow, 1998), school choice (André Bechely, 2005; Stambach  & David, 2005), school management (Chan, 2004), and leadership (Sachs & Blackmore, 2007). Feminist educational policy analysis suggests that policies, like workers and organizations, are gendered (Marshall, 1999; Rhoten, 2000; Stambach  & David, 2005). Stambach and David, (2005) call our attention to educational policies’ connection to institutional histories in which persons are differently situated in power relations. They point out, for example, that mothers and fathers have “different histories of engagement within families and public education” (p. 1637). They examine how school choice policies conceptualize “mothers,” “fathers,” and “parents.” Similarly, I  examine how neoliberal education reforms conceptualize teachers in relation to “histories of engagement” with schools, with work, and with the state. As Datnow (1998) has shown, teachers read policies from within the gendered hierarchies of schools. However, this study enhances hers because teachers read policies as well as the lack of policies and provisions, and act according to gendered institutional roles to fill that policy gap. Chapter 5, for example, details how teachers enact one policy (scholarships) and fight for another one (school snacks). Teachers do not just “receive” policies to implement and then negotiate their meaning on the ground (e.g., Lipsky 1980/2010; Weatherly & Lipsky 1977); they go after them in order to educate, and they do so enacting masculine and feminine roles and responsibilities surrounding food as part of their education work. Research also tends to personify policy, as if policy on paper (rather than people writing it or deciding how to enforce and do policy) is what gets the proverbial job done. Yet it is men and women enmeshed in struggles for limited material and symbolic resources in contexts of inequality that produce (and contest and resist) educational change. Gender policy analysis acknowledges the integral role masculinities and femininities play in organizational change, from policy creation to implementation. Finally,

22  Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments educational research often treats policy as a linear two-step function and focuses analysis on the outcome, rather than on the process. However, so much transpires between crafting policy language, interpretation, and production. How policies work is not linear and not static; rather, they change with the actors involved in the contexts where they are doing policy. Street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) exercise discretion in the process of reconfiguring boundaries around their work and professional identities (Watkins-Hayes, 2009). As public, front-line workers, they exercise agency “in the spaces between and the ambiguities within rules and systems to serve” the public (Rowe, 2012, p.  2). Teachers’ negotiations of policy demands thus reveal “kinds of ‘boundary work’ that enable/disable professionalising projects” (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 4). Neoliberal education reform has brought about complexly gendered realities for teachers, unleashed on an unequal social, political, and economic terrain. “Neoliberalism is in principle gender neutral. The ‘individual’ has no gender, and the market delivers advantage to the smartest entrepreneur, not to men or women as such” (Connell, 2005, p. 1815). Yet women and men live and teach in contexts of social and cultural inequality. They make decisions and negotiate professional boundaries based on their own limited and finite material and symbolic resources from their location in the policy context. ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL Steiner-Khamsi, Silova, and Johnson (2006) found care work linked to measures to hold teachers accountable for improving the quality of education. For example, Mongolian teachers could be rewarded or punished through salary bonuses if not punishing children’s behavior, keeping the classroom clean, or keeping the children clean (p. 230). This system of accountability elicited fear, anger, negative responses, and stress amongst teachers. By creating tighter control linked to reward or punishment, the system elicited forms of care work and emotional labor (Hochschild, 2012), a management of workers’ emotions. Yet the symbolic and material politics from which care work emerged were not critiqued. A more critical reading suggests that global reforms did precious little to support a space for teachers to work at educating and creating a platform from which to develop “their professionalizing projects” (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 4). Furthermore, Steiner-Khamsi, Silova, and Johnson (2006) found neoliberalism to be “liberally applied” in local contexts referring to the vastly different changes adopted under the umbrella of outcomes-based education. Yet the authors did not apply (liberally or otherwise) historically and socioculturally gendered (or raced, classed, etc.) dynamics to their discussion of global or local reform. Instead their analysis re-inscribed hegemonic notions of global reform transpiring neutrally and apolitically as it travels over time and through space. Care/caring emerged as a dominant theme in this study too. Initially, I  was drawn to gender scholars’ framings of care work, because it is a

Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments  23 defining characteristic of teaching. The level and nature of care responsibilities vary across education, with preschool and elementary teachers performing more than high school or postsecondary educators. Also the amount of care work performed by women has grown exponentially with the emergence of globalization (Chen, Vanek, Flund, & Heintz, 2005; Collins, 2003; Ehrenreich  & Hochschild, 2004; Mohanty, 1997). Most care work is performed by women or by men and women in occupations considered women’s work; most care work is moving into the realm of paid work albeit poorly remunerated in comparison with other occupations of equal education/training; and, most care workers cite intrinsic rewards (England, 2005, p. 395). Teachers were similarly engaged in care work in a policy context where their work was presumably contained to transparent, rational (unemotional), standardized, and measurable tasks. Caring should characterize the educator-student relationship. I  subscribe to Noddings’s (1992) call for education to center on caring as a productive means to counter widespread discontent with public schools. However, I  question the insertion of care into the public sphere, understanding that in no society is “the work of caretaking . . . valued as highly as economic production” (Britton, 2000) and also knowing “unpaid care work shapes the ability, duration and types of paid work that can be undertaken” (Antonopoulos, 2009). Thus the present study cautiously considers the potential effect of teachers’ unpaid care work on teachers’ paid work: educating youth. More specifically, I critique instances where care work comes to the fore as they are manifestations of contrary policy outcomes, counter to the imagined neoliberal subject, policy enactments out of control.

REFERENCES Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4(2), 139–158. André-Bechely, L. (2005). Could it be otherwise? Parents and the inequities of public school choice. New York, NY: Routledge. Antonopoulos, R. (2009). The unpaid care work—paid work connection (Working paper no. 86). Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. Apple, M. W. (1986). Teachers and texts: A political economy of class and gender relations in education. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ball, S., Maguire, M. & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. London, England: Routledge. Biklen, S. (1995). School work: Gender and the cultural construction of teaching. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Britton, D. M. (2000). The epistemology of the gendered organisation. Gender and Society, 14(3), 418–434. Chan, A. K.-w. (2004). Gender, school management and educational reforms: A case study of a primary school in Hong Kong. Gender and Education, 16(4), 491–510. Chen, M., Vanek, J., Flund, F. & Heintz, J. (2005). Progress of the world’s women: Women, work, and poverty. New York, NY: United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

24  Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments Collins, J. L. (2003). Threads: Gender, labour, and power in the global apparel industry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Connell, R. W. (2005). “Change among the gatekeepers: Men, masculinities, and gender equality in the global arena.” Signs, 30(3), 1801–1825. Cortina, R.& San Román, S. (Eds.). (2006). Women and teaching: Global perspectives on the feminisation of a profession. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Datnow, A. (1998). The gender politics of educational change. London, England: Falmer Press. Dirié, C., & Oiberman, I. (1999). La inserción laboral de los docentes en la Argentina. [Teachers’ labor insertion in Argentina]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ministry of Education. Ehrenreich, B., & Hochschild, A. R. (2004). Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy (1st Owl Books ed.). New York, NY: Metropolitan/Owl Books. England, P. (2005). Emerging theories of care work. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 381–399. Fischman, G. (2000). Imagining teachers: Rethinking gender dynamics in teacher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Fischman, G. (2007). Persistence and ruptures: The feminization of teaching and teacher education in Argentina. Gender and Education, 19(3), 353–368. Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Lipsky, M. (1980/2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service, 30th anniversary expanded ed. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Marshall, C. (1999). Researching the margins: Feminist critical policy analysis. Educational Policy, 13(1), 59–76. Mohanty, C. T. (1997). Women workers and capitalist scripts: Ideologies of domination, common interests, and the politics of solidarity. In M. J. Alexander  & C. T. Mohanty (Eds.), Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures (pp. 3–22). New York, NY: Routledge. Morgade, G. & Bellucci, M. (1997). Mujeres en la educación: Género y docencia en Argentina, 1870–1930. [Women in education: Gender and teaching in Argentina, 1870–1930]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Minõ y Dávila. Noddings, N. (1992). The challenge to care in schools: an alternative approach to education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Peck, J. (1996). Work-place: The social regulation of labor markets. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Reid, A. (2003). Understanding teachers’ work: Is there still a place for labour process theory? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2(5), 559–573. Rhoten, D. 2000. Education decentralization in Argentina: A “global–local conditions of possibility” approach to state, market, and society change. Journal of Education Policy, 15(6), 593–619. Rowe, M. (2012). Going back to the street: Revisiting Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy. Teaching Public Administration, 30, 10–18. Sachs, J. & Blackmore, J. (2007). Performing and reforming leaders: Gender, educational restructuring, and organisational change. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Seddon, T., with J. Ozga, & J. S. Levin. (2013). Global transitions and teacher professionalism. In T. Seddon and J. S. Levin (Eds.), World Yearbook of Education 2013: Educators, professionalism and politics: Global transitions, national spaces, and professional projects (pp. 3–24). New York, NY: Routledge. Silver, P. (2007). “Then I  do what I  want:” Teachers, state, and empire in 2000. American Ethnologist, 34(2), 268–284.

Theorizing Teachers’ Gendered Policy Enactments  25 Smith, D.E. (1988). The everyday world as problematic. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Stambach, A.  & David, M. (2005). Feminist Theory and Educational Policy: How gender has been ‘involved’ in family school choice debates. Signs, 30(2), 1633–1659. Steiner-Khamsi, G., Silova, I., & Johnson, E. (2006). Neoliberalism liberally applied: Educational policy borrowing in Central Asia. In D. Coulby, J. Ozga, T. Seddon, & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.) 2006 world yearbook on education (pp. 217–245). New York, NY: Routledge. Superfine, B. M., Gottlieb, J. J., & Smylie, M. A. (2012). The expanding federal role in teacher workforce policy. Educational Policy, 26(1), 58–78. Tiramonti, G. (2001). Sindicalismo docente y reforma educativa en la América Latina de los ’90 [Teachers’ unions and educational reform in Latin America in the 1990s]. In G. Tiramonti & D. Filmus (Eds.), Sindicalismo docente y reforma educativa en la América Latina [Teachers’ unions and educational reform in Latin America] (pp. 111–146). Buenos Aires, Argentina: TEMAS Grupo Editorial. Watkins-Hays, C. (2009). The new welfare bureaucrats: Entanglements of race, class, and policy reform. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

2 How We Get Work Gendering Teacher Preparation, Licensure, and the Job of Getting a Job

INTRODUCTION The quest to fill public school classrooms with qualified and quality teachers has been the intense focus of neoliberal reform globally. The meaning of qualified, quality, and accountability, however, continues to elude researchers, policy makers, and teachers alike (Mausethagen, 2013). Nevertheless, nations continue to embark on massive reforms of teacher education, curriculum, teacher pay, and workforce entry. Researchers and administrators attempt to translate the terms into practices that fill classrooms with qualified teachers (Roellke & Rice, 2008). Who enters teacher education, why, what they learn while there, and whether their preparation aligns with the structure of school districts afterwards are paths to control the production of quality and ensure that teachers are qualified. Changes to teacher pay and workforce entry/permanence also allow for control over which teachers enter and remain in classrooms. Yet models of the teacher and of what comprises quality teacher education already circulate in everyday discourse on global and local levels along with deeply rooted symbolic images of “the teacher.” Furthermore, there are teachers who have obtained teacher education, jobs, and experience educating in the reform context. In this chapter, I examine where, how, and why teachers enter professional programs and what curriculum they learn while there. As first steps toward the classroom, and a crucial moment in which learned and enacted curriculum can be shaped, teacher education is indeed a reform focus. Teacher education reform in Argentina involved both a transformation of teacher education curriculum in public institutes and approval of private teacher institutes. The reform of curriculum and pathways to the classroom represent a significant rupture in the one-hundred-year old system of normal institutes. Neoliberal reforms around the world have set their sights on how teachers are prepared for the classroom as a means to control quality. Often, proposed changes are justified because student achievement is lagging or national economic growth depends on it. Poor teacher quality, beginning with preparation for the classroom, is an impediment to national economic prosperity.

How We Get Work  27 I also examine where, how, and why teachers enter the labor market. Labor market entry and permanence are two more avenues for controlling the path to the classroom for quality teachers. The new teacher must obtain work. This is an overly simplistic description of teachers’ invested labor to finish their education and enter the ranks of eligible public school teachers. Entry to the profession involves gendered bodies negotiating institutions and work. I  historicize teachers’ negotiations of teacher education, licensure, and search for work. Historicizing the real and imagined teacher provides some explanation for how the teachers in this study navigate these three occupational points. History does not determine teachers’ decisions about their profession, but it reveals the institutional divisions between the home, schools, the state, and women and men that shape and are shaped by neoliberal reform and subsequently, teachers’ gendered policy enactments. Not all teachers must navigate change to teacher education and workforce entry; teachers are already educated and certified and teaching. Some of the teachers in this study pass through these entry points. However, others had long been teaching in the public school system. They may not pass through new teacher education programs or have their pay structure changed. Nevertheless, they do pay attention to changes to their profession. This and subsequent chapter ensures that their valuable professional insights are validated (Rendón, 2002). The data reveal masculinities and femininities advantage and disadvantage the teachers—at times it is evident as a binary that favors women over men. For example, women in this study attend the traditional teacher normal schools in the City. They are accessible, nonsensical choices for middle class women who wish to become teachers. However, they are long, rigorous, demanding of more time than public and private institutes in the Province. Furthermore, the curriculum does not align with the Province’s labor market, where work was available when reforms were initiated. Men attend public and private teacher institutes in the Province. A gender binary in the division of preparation for labor emerges that is buttressed by history. Teachers are aware that new boundaries are being drawn around entry to the work of teaching. The women voiced concern for the ways that boundaries between paid and unpaid responsibilities shifted, increasing unpaid homework and making it invisible. The division of labor between women and men in and between public (work) and private (the home) spheres emerges as a concern for women and at times, men. Rather than the hyper-flexibility of the labor market to presumably accommodate reproductive work, teachers want stable work hours or they want their wives to be at home to ease the complex structure of work hours. The ideal of quality and qualified teachers is complicated by reform, not resolved. In this chapter, I  argue that the changes to teacher education, how teachers’ work is organized, and how it is remunerated, cultivate uncertainty about the teaching profession overall rather than clarify paths towards quality education and teacher qualification. Entry into the

28  How We Get Work profession involves a dialectic of persons and institutions reflective of Acker’s (1990) first of five interactive processes of gendering of organizations and the workers within them. The first interactive process involves a division of labor between women and men and locations in physical space. Who accesses which teacher education program illustrates the way the dialectic works in decisions of where to study and why. The transformation of the pay structure and access to work hours represent institutionalized means of maintaining divisions in labor markets, the family, and the state. Women and men in this study work in classrooms and in homes. They do teaching work, but they also do unpaid work as part of a family. They have lives beyond the classroom. When paid work changes and when the distribution of work hours changes, teachers must make decisions as teachers, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, parents, potentially reifying dividing lines between work and family, or crafting new ones. How do new teacher education, credentials, and workforce entry reflect new forms and purposes of control embedded in neoliberal reforms? How do they compare/contrast with the old forms and purposes? And how do teachers negotiate the newness, if at all? The reforms do little toward ensuring quality and qualified educators enter and remain in the classroom. This can be partially explained by the ways gendered divisions of labor that are institutionalized are exacerbated by change. In fact, the reforms seem to have little to do with improving education and more to do with appeasing a large sector of the population unqualified for the global, open market economy. I begin the chapter with a brief history of Argentina’s “teacher.” This is by no means a comprehensive historical overview of teachers and teaching in Argentina. There are abundant sources that detail this topic (see, for example, Fischman, 2000; Morgade, 1992; Pineau, 1997; Puiggrós, 1996). Rather it is an introduction to the gendered and classed dynamics that shape and are shaped by teachers’ decisions to enter teaching. The next section details teacher education reform and is divided into subsections that elaborate on traditional, public normal institutes and university-based teacher education unaffected by reform and reformed public and new private teacher institutes that emerged as a result of proposed changes. Here we see the historical frame of teachers illuminated. Additionally, teachers share insight related to program quality and who the programs are qualifying. These subsections complicate the reform terms and also complicate the seemingly simplistic gender binary of women studying in one place and men studying in another. The section that follows details the elaborate ways that teaching work is organized or packaged by categories (e.g., permanent, provisional, substitute), by hours per week, by amount of work to be performed per hour, and how that work is secured. Throughout the sections the issues of stability/instability, of visible/invisible work, and of flexibility/inflexibility are the boundaries navigated by teachers. The dividing lines between those

How We Get Work  29 antonyms reveal the ways that reform has introduced new forms of control over teachers’ labor at times advantaging women and still at other times men. The dividing lines also reflect painful, broader transformations occurring in the economy that education is seemingly charged with soothing. A BRIEF HISTORY OF TEACHERS IN ARGENTINA: A FRAMEWORK Teachers/teaching in Argentina slightly shifted in terms of gendered and classed identity of the symbolic and real teacher from middle class women to working class men. I  note that the shift is slight and location-specific within the researched context. As the discussion below reveals, middle class women who teach in the City are “protected” from the reform and their dominance in the teaching profession is unchallenged. However, this is not the case in the Province of Buenos Aires, where the reform examined here opens up new professional opportunities for working class men. As this chapter focuses on entry points to teaching, the history of “the teacher,” where the teacher studied before entering the classroom, and finally, how the teachers’ workday was structured in Argentina are important beginnings for understanding the interactive gendering process. Teachers approach teacher education and where/how to work as gendered workers-in-training. However, they also approached the profession from a constrained historical view dominated by powerful symbolic identities about who teaches what. Teachers begin to negotiate—if they must at all—the new boundaries around teacher education, licensure, and workforce entry with limited gendered and classed imaginations and examples.

Middle-Class Women Historically, teaching has been a feminine and middle-class profession in Argentina. The symbolic image of the young and feminine teacher was conceived at the inception of the public education system in the 1880s. Middleclass women flocked to teacher preparation programs (Morgade & Bellucci, 1997), one of the first professions open to women, offering the chance at continued education and a job. The salary and benefits reflected the feminine construction of the teacher and feminized work performed. It was, still is, low, partially explained by the assumption that the women teachers are bringing home a supplementary family income. The presumption was (and still is) that teachers—presumed to be women—were dependents of a father or a husband who was (is) the primary breadwinner. Yet in the years prior to conducting this study, approximately 40% of women teachers nationwide were identified as primary breadwinners for the family unit (Dirié & Oiberman, 1999, p. 3–4).

30  How We Get Work Women account for 79.4% of the teacher corps when combining preschool, elementary, secondary, and tertiary (non-university programs) (Ministry of Education, 2006). The numbers vary slightly for metropolitan Buenos Aires, where this research was conducted. Women comprise 77.1% of all City of Buenos Aires teachers and 81.4% in the Province of Buenos Aires. Women represent just over 66% of high school teachers nationwide. No figures were available specifically for history teachers.

Working-Class Men While such symbolism persisted throughout the 20th century (Morgade, 1992), research now suggests that at the turn of the 21st century, working-class men are changing the face of the Argentine teaching corps (Fischman, 2000). The feminine and feminized nature of teaching is nuanced and merits further dissection. Fischman (2007) writes, “contemporary social representations of teachers [as mothers] have simultaneously discarded, preserved and transformed symbolic characteristics from the past” (p. 364). During the time of this study, high school teaching became an attractive profession for working-class men in the wake of neoliberal state reforms and massive layoffs following privatization of state industry (e.g., gas, oil, railroads, and water). The conceptualization of teaching as women’s work was shifting (Dirié & Oiberman, 1999): working-class men challenged teaching and teacher education’s feminine dynamics (Fischman, 2007). While teaching continues to be performed largely by women and to be considered women’s work, referring to teaching as feminized does not equate to an understanding of how feminization is produced and reproduced. Such dynamics often go unrecognized in reform contexts and policy analyses that conceive of workers and work through static gendered lenses assumed to be natural and stable. When such dynamics are overly attributed to institutional constraints or to the absolute power of policy to change behavior within the institutions, the interplay of structure and persons is overlooked. Men are in the minority, but have always been in the minority, in Argentina’s public schools. Why this reform context may be different merits consideration. TEACHER EDUCATION Where teachers participating in this study attend professional school is a simple—though not simplistic—binary: middle-class women attend traditional, public normal schools or pedagogy programs embedded within a national (e.g., state-funded and public/free) university. Working-class men attend recently reformed public institutes or new, private teacher education institutes in the metropolitan area, at least for their initial teaching credentials. The authorization of private teacher education programs after

How We Get Work  31 a century of public-only teacher education programs is a significant rupture to the teaching profession.

A Note About New Curriculum Along with private teacher education programs comes a reorganization of teacher knowledge. Curriculum is reorganized into multidisciplinary subjects. Instead of separate certification programs for history, geography, and civics, a new social sciences and humanities certification is offered with emphasis in a discipline and/or a newly introduced concept of a middle school education. This is a dramatic rupture in the organization of teacher content knowledge, how teaching work is defined, and how it is controlled. Teachers’ work has been organized in such a way as to facilitate the kind of outcome that is required by the state. The key element—the glue that hangs all [work] activities together—is the curriculum. The formal curriculum (. . .) is not just a description of what students should learn. It builds on and confirms the” hidden curriculum” the organizational arrangements and practices that establish the” right” way to function in classrooms, schools, and educational systems. Together, the formal and hidden curricula describe the nature of the” capacities for social practice” that are being developed. In short, they define the task of teaching. (Reid, 2003, p. 566–567) The general consensus is that teaching and teacher knowledge was not improved through curricular reform. As one key informant, a history professor from a City of Buenos Aires high school, explained, the interdisciplinary courses were viewed collectively as “an emptying of curricular content. They worked like a microwave: put all history [content], all geography [content] into it. When you take it out, there are parts that are lukewarm and others are just bland.”

Traditional Teacher Education and History Credentials All the participants consider Joaquín V. Gonzalez the most prestigious, nonuniversity teacher education program in metropolitan Buenos Aires. It is located in the City of Buenos Aires and accessible via public transportation. For one hundred years it has been accessible financially to generations of teachers. It is public and it is free. It has also been geographically accessible to women, centrally located near a major bus hub and commuter train lines. Only women in this study attended Joaquín V. Gonzalez. The men attended private teacher education programs (discussed below). Four Jacaranda teachers attended Joaquín V. Gonzalez and two attended public

32  How We Get Work university teacher-training programs. Four of the five women at Pampas attended Joaquín V. Gonzalez. One, Espina, attended the University of Buenos Aires. All the women teachers were confident that they received the best education for their career. Whenever asked about their preparation, they straightened up and without blinking mentioned the educational institution, their degree, and reasserted that they completed four years of intensive preparation. Where a teacher studied plays a significant role in their attitude towards their profession and their sense of prestige. ECHEVERRIA: I am a graduate of Joaquín V. González and they inculcate in us, with few exceptions, how to be high school teachers.  .  .  .  My program gave me a great preparation [for teaching], I am very happy to be a graduate of Joaquín V. González. I am very happy. ALVAREZ:  I am also a graduate of the same program. And I am happy with my training too. One concern was raised, though by only two of the traditional normal school graduates. It was the lack of practicums, hands-on experiences. Paula Albertini was the only Jacaranda teacher who voiced a desire to change her teacher education program because, “it had very little didactic training, but we had so much content. I  think that when one knows the subject, later [you] can adapt it to anything. If there is no professional foundation and knowledge related to the subject, there is no way to face anything.” She took continuing education courses to make up for the lack of pedagogical content in her program. Similarly, Ana Laura Cabezas stated, “I wish the [hands-on] training started little-by-little, not only at the end, and in different schools and districts.” She too attended Joaquín V. Gonzalez, but worked at Pampas. Still, their claim to prestige was attributed to the degree-granting institution and to the content-rich program. Women study history full-time, fourteen courses each year, to teach. It was rigorous, as Ana Estela Rubinstein suggests in the following exchange: RUBINSTEIN:  We complained because our courses were too academic, because they were too focused on the disciplines and content. . . . but in retrospect the excess content, at the least, I  do not feel that it bothered me that much, but rather served me well. AR:   How so? RUBINSTEIN:  Well, because I think that it is better to have an excess of knowledge than a lack of knowledge. Because with an excess of content, in the end, if you survive [the program], it will provide you with your own judgment. To the contrary, a lack of content knowledge leaves you more insecure, then you end up accepting whatever [curriculum] they give you.

How We Get Work  33 The teachers regularly clarified that they studied four years full-time before entering the classroom. They did not work in schools while completing their teacher education program. Thus, it is not a surprise when teachers run down the list of courses taken in a typical year, as Albertini does here: Each year you have courses, for example, History of Egypt and the ancient Near East; History of Greece; History of Rome; Middle Ages; Modern History; Contemporary History; Historiography, which obviously was just an introduction; The Argentinas 1, 2, 3, and 4, which began with colonial Argentina; and afterwards we had what we called, pejoratively, the “Generals,” which were, for example, a course called Elocution, which, I think, does not exist now, that has to do with the use of language; and we had pedagogy and psychology but were for less credit hours and so were not as comprehensive as I would have liked. Studying at Joaquín V. González was intense and demanding. Albertini, explains that “she appreciated her studies so much.” They were not flexible and they were demanding. Her parents supported her while she studied. “The program is the same style as high school: you took classes and the classes lasted almost the entire day. I did not have flexible hours like at the university.” She also noted that in order to complete her program in four years she had to finish classes and practicums simultaneously. “The practicum was like a final exam where they placed you in a high school.” Albertini mentions, however, that even Joaquín V. Gonzalez has changed: Today there are women colleagues that completed a different course plan. So first they complete their courses and then they lose a half a year or more or” are employed,” call it what you want, the same instructor from the Institute places you in a secondary school to work. Her comment suggests that even the traditional, normal institutes are changing. She is not convinced by the change, particularly that a new teacher works, imparting what has been learned during the program, without recognition or pay. When asked if they worked during their teacher education, two women, Cabezas and Echeverria commented, “Yes, as a housewife.” However, they are the only two women teachers who were wives and/or mothers at the time they studied. Cabezas and Echeverria acknowledged the concept of a double shift or double burden, of having two jobs: one in the “public sphere” and one in the “private sphere,” space of the home. In this case, they worked two shifts for no income; they worked toward the promise of a salary. (This theme emerges again when teachers discuss their unpaid homework below.)

34  How We Get Work Prior to the decentralization of high schools and curricular reform, high schools in Argentina were organized the same way, had similar dividing lines between subject matter. Thus teacher education programs were preparation for work in any corner of the nation. However, when Cabezas graduated from Gonzalez, there was no work available in City schools. Her education—elementary, secondary, and teacher preparation—was in City schools. Cabezas had to learn a new education system and curriculum as she sought work in the Province. The Province had adopted curricular and structural reforms. School reform in the province created a distance from the City school structure and curriculum and teacher education. However, women living in the City could travel to Province schools and they did so to work. Alejandra Espina describes this learning as another “teacher preparation, self guided” echoing both of Cabezas’s concerns. While Espina lives in the Province and chose to seek work in the Province, she also chose to attend the University of Buenos Aires for her history and pedagogical preparation. However thorough the preparation, it did not prepare her for her first years in the classroom, nor for the eventual reform of the Province’s school organization and curriculum.

Learning to Accept the Career While the women in this study lauded their professional education, they did not all choose their paths to the profession. For Isabel Gomez and Monica Alvarez, it was chosen for them. When Alvarez could not find work in the tourism industry after graduating with a specialized postsecondary degree, she needed work. She was advised toward a teaching career by several women in her family who were teachers, including her mother. Isabel Gomez was advised toward a teaching career based on the results of a “vocational test” she took at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Though other members of her extended family were teachers too, she did not cite this as having an influence on her career choice. In the quote below she describes why she became a teacher: I completed a teaching program for history . . . but not because I like history. I went to the UBA. There they made me take . . . to find out, feel things out, before registering . . . they made me take a test . . . that orients you to what you might want to study because at the same time I  was beginning a [program] in business administration. Something totally different. So they asked me, “Do you like history?” “Yes,” I answered. And do you like to do research or to teach?” I like to teach and I like research too, but in the future. I told them that I had to have a foundation before doing research; so they told me,” Well, teaching would suit you better, and afterward, if you’d like, you can study in the university, but you are not going to be able to do it here at the UBA.”

How We Get Work  35 That’s because at the UBA they have a requirement that you take the CBC, which is an entry exam. They told me that I could study at the university [level], but at a different [university], like a private one or a provincial one, but not at the UBA. So I went and enrolled in a teacher education program. Unconvinced by the vocational option provided, and disappointed by being counseled out of the prestigious and public university, Gomez enrolled in Joaquin V. Gonzalez and in a postseondary business management program, hoping that she would be able to decide later what career to pursue. She attempted to keep up with the two programs, but within months decided she would leave the business one. She said she could not stay awake in her classes; she was so tired from commuting, studying, and classes. Gomez began to focus only on her teaching program and her interest in teaching and history grew.

Privatization and Reformed Teacher Education Programs For the men interviewed for this study, all of whom lived in the Province, Joaquín V. Gonzalez was not a viable option for a number of reasons that will become apparent, including location in the City. All of the men lived in the Province. Another reason was when they entered the profession. All the men except Lautaro Morales pursued a career in teaching years, and in two cases decades, after entering the workforce. Still another reason was the need to get into the classroom and earn a salary and social benefits, because they had families. Alberto Membrives, Esteban Polanco, Enrique Morino, and Mario Macaya all attended reformed public teaching institutes in the Province. Lautaro Morales attended a new private institute. Through their narratives we learn that the privatization of teacher education is not the first wave of privatization to affect them. Massive privatization of state industries affected their lives first. Membrives explained his life in the early 1990s as everything being in order: he had a promising career trajectory with the national railroads; he was happily married; he had children, and he had begun to study history through a teacher education program. He enrolled in the history teaching program not with the intent to become a history teacher, but because he wanted to study history and could not access a university to do so. However as state industries, like the railroad, were privatized, his salary leveled off. He decided to accept an early retirement package and pursue a teaching career. Privatization closed one career door (finance work with the railroads) and opened another (teaching history). Esteban Polanco also worked for the national railroads, the same as his father before him. However, in the early 1990s, he was laid off and then

36  How We Get Work offered an early retirement package. In need of employment, but without an education or training for any other occupation, he decided to turn his interest in history into a career. He enrolled in a teaching program in the Province. For three years he studied and worked at odd jobs such as a doorto-door book salesperson to support his family and pay for his studies. Polanco suggested that the quality of teacher education programs is in decline due to the Federal Education Law’s curricular and structural reforms. Private teacher education institutes provide the minimum requirements to enter the classroommore quickly, at times sending students out to take on teaching hours after completing only 40% of their coursework. He uses himself as an example. He began teaching after completing three years of a four-year program. Polanco suggests that unprepared students entered the classroom out of necessity; in the mid-1990s, secondary education was expanding rapidly and the state needed teachers to fill new classrooms. Macaya, however, faults the interdisciplinary curriculum taught in teacher education institutes as the cause of decline in teacher education quality. As was common among men interviewed, he first distances his Province-based professional education from the reform. What is interesting about Macaya’s reflections is that he also deploys the feminine and masculine terms for teachers to differentiate who studies pre-reform and post-reform and what they study (history or social sciences), which is somewhat lost in translation. I don’t know if I was the last or almost the last to graduate from the old program. . . . These new forms, these new provincial laws and, it seems to me, they lack content compared to what we [men] teachers studied. For that reason, specifically the person who graduates from a History Teaching Certification Program is a history teacher and now the man who graduates from that program [teaches] social sciences. I can also tell you that what I see, I do not like, especially . . . especially . . . if these new titles help reform education. I can tell you that yes, yes they help. Now: how? If they did not help then what was the education reform. Do you know what I mean? The new titles helped in a bad way. Macaya continues to provide examples to support his assertion that the reform cuts a deep dividing line between pre-reform and post-reform educators. Again he uses feminine terms to refer to the pre-reform educated teachers and masculine terms for the post-reform educated teachers. MACAYA: Here the older women have much more seniority than me. Ok? And keep in mind . . . (Sorry that I use [the older women] as an example) And keep in mind that the older women who have more seniority, are more willing to work, and they are the ones . . . who are always innovating something. To me, I think, if we are going to talk seriously, right? That starting with teacher quality something that I  do not want

How We Get Work  37 to critique with this example but if you have to tell it like it is . . . ­because what happened is that many people who want you to think they know a lot don’t know shit and they want to teach, many times when the teachers who have been here a long time . . . start to discuss things that you don’t have any idea what they’re talking about and above all creativity. I see more and more willingness to work in the older women who have been here a long time and in theory should be much more tired. . . . Do you understand? SAR:   Yes MACAYA: . . . than in the new teachers. In other words, like me here. We are talking here about a difference, a very bad difference. Morales was from a younger generation of working-class men. His experience of privatization differs from Membrives, Polanco, and Morino. He was not forced into a false retirement. There were no other jobs. From his perspective, the de-industrialization of the nation, followed by the sale of private industry, concentrated the means of production in fewer hands, leaving few employment options for working-class youth like himself. Privatization and other reforms of public education aim to prepare only a few youth for work in a new global financial market. The rest would be limited to part-time, undependable, and unpredictable service or labor-intensive jobs. His professional opportunities are limited.

Social Studies “Teacher Mills” Men and women teachers at Pampas are concerned about the quality of the Province’s teacher training programs, especially newer private programs. As Echeverria stated, “[some Province teachers] rapidly completed new teacher certification programs, many in the private sector where [the programs] are only interested in profit. So the educational quality is bad, they prepare bad teachers that then come to teach classes.” Men had similar critiques of their training. They called the private institutes, “teacher mills.” As Morales pointed out, “Thirty [students] enter and thirty graduate and that is not reasonable.” He found it incomprehensible that a meritocratic, or any, system of sorting was not applied to teacher candidates. By qualifying all students, the newer Province programs—in his opinion—were lowering the bar on teacher quality. Morales doubted he knew much more than his students and believed that his lack of knowledge was quite intentional. MORALES:  An academic level [of quality] does not exist. SAR: I don’t understand. MORALES: You don’t understand? They prepare us, teachers, in such a manner that in reality we know five percent more than our students and nothing more.

38  How We Get Work SAR:   The teacher training programs . . . MORALES:   The teacher training programs. SAR:   . . . in the Province? MORALES:   In the Province. It’s a sinister issue. GOMEZ:  Since there was no prior preparation, [the government] implemented, as Margarita said, the law abruptly. So . . . MORALES:  And the federal law, the only thing that it pondered, were issues: how do we apply the law from an economic perspective; how do we apply the law from a political perspective; not from reality, from sensibilities. It all sounds very good. The law is very good, but the reality is not. It’s not. ECHEVERRIA: But to me it seems to have to do with . . . returning to the issue of teacher preparation and the education law, [the provincial government] created those new teacher training programs because there were not teachers in social studies, in natural sciences, in “areas.” They [also] created new teacher training programs in the Province because people who work and live in the Province . . . the cost of travel is very high so it became a business to set up new programs. Furthermore, in the economic context here people didn’t have work. A four-year teaching program gives you secure work and benefits. This excerpt introduces multiple issues related to provincial teacher education programs and the reform process itself. The excerpt once again suggests that the newer provincial training programs are of poor quality. However, here Morales alludes to why they are of poor quality: he’s not supposed to know much more than his students. As a woking-class male in a working-class to poor school, he believed the low expectations for him (and therefore his students), was part of a larger political and economic process meant to dumb down the population to accommodate a poorly performing economy. Or worse: since Argentina has not been able to expand work opportunities to more than a select few, the government must find a way to contain an unemployed working-class population in schools. In the 1990s the Province had to deal with a rapidly increasing rate of unemployment among males of working age due to internal migration caused by a lack of jobs in rural areas and massive layoffs in the wake of privatization of state (federal) industry. Echeverria believed that the educational reform provided a way for the provincial government to address male unemploymentthat presented a political opportunity to gain favor among a dispossessed group and an economic opportunity for entrepreneurs in a slouching economy by creating a new market: teacher training in area studies. Educational reform placated victims of the federal and provincial

How We Get Work  39 government’s economic reforms. However, it did so at the expense of the teaching profession, educational quality, and youth. I think that these ten years of savage neoliberalism, corrupt and useless Menemism, achieved its goal: to make the country stupid and the people more manageable, and it’s going to cost not ten, I don’t know, not twenty or how many, I don’t know whether I will see it . . . see it get out of this educational disaster, because it is very intentional, it is. For capitalism to function you have to have “natural” inequality. Morales just could not escape the reforms and perhaps because of this, he was often the most outspoken. While Morales chose to become a teacher, he only had access to a private and post-reform teacher education institute. However, he often identified his certification as multidisciplinary with a history concentration. Morales dreamed of being a researcher. He thought doing research enabled individuals to leave their mark on the world. However, he was unable to become a researcher, citing his social and economic background. He also cited his teacher education. His educational opportunities were limited and therefore he was limited to the job of a high school teacher for the moment. In the future, he hoped to acquire enough classroom experience to become a pedagogical advisor, an administrative position in the Province. Enrique Morino, on the other hand, would not let his class or his less than prestigious teacher education credentials get in the way of his career plans. He intended to become a researcher, move through teaching gigs to get there. (More on gigs below when I  discuss the search for work.) Morino glosses over his teacher education. He has no desire to reflect on his educational history. He is plowing forward, first through a university-level bachillerato in history, finished during this study, and next into a master’s program in history. Morino’s lack of interest in discussing his educational history stands in stark contrast to his desire to talk history, the minutiae, not the grand narrative. His goal was not to be a teacher; it was to be an intellectual, a researcher. HOW TEACHERS’ WORK IS ORGANIZED: STABILITY, FLEXIBILITY, AND INTENSITY Teachers’ work is categorized according to three titles and related arrangements: tenured (permanent work till retirement), provisional (no ownership of work, indefinite timeframe), and substitution (no ownership of work, definite timeframe). According to the National Education Census (2006), 60% percent of teachers worked only tenured hours, just over 9% percent had only provisional hours, and almost 19% percent had only substitute hours. The remaining 12% worked a combination of tenured, provisional, and substitute positions. The teacher participants in this study mirror this breakdown.

40  How We Get Work In 2006, the national education census added a new work title. Contract work was defined as persons hired outside of the three pre-existing categories (Ministry of Education, p. 16). Just over 3% of teachers are performing this type of work. It is plausible that the actual figure is higher, as many teachers combine positions over the course of an academic year and tabulations did not separate out contract work plus other forms of work. None of the teachers in my study mentioned this arrangement and therefore further critique is not included here. However, the appearance of contract work in an already fractured labor market deserves further scrutiny in relation to the broader neoliberal reform trends in education and the economy. It potentially illustrates the ways that educators are now being hired outside of collective bargaining agreements, for example.

Old/Experienced/Stable All Jacaranda teachers worked full time at Jacaranda. Only Agostini and Sofia Corti teach one additional class at other schools. By choice, they chose to teach different content (Agostini, art history) or to teach different aged students (Corti, university students). Furthermore, Jacaranda teachers worked long hours each week, between 30 and 60 hours. Jacaranda educators all had full-time, tenured hours, because they were hired full time. Sofia Corti, Jacaranda Director, explained this as a schoolbased hiring policy referred to as Project 13, a 30-year-old pilot project that presumably was “testing” the benefits of hiring teachers to teach multiple classes (factors of 6 beginning with 12, 24, 36, etc.) in one school. Jacaranda teachers are provided stable employment at one school. The school administration fills openings from a city-generated seniority list, but candidates choose all hours available or none, they must commit to becoming a part of the school community. The teachers are grateful, aware that to teach in one school is becoming a relic of the past. Albertini states, “I am privileged. I have all of my work hours in just one high school, 54 hours a week.” She realizes this is a privilege because she has met teachers from the Province. I have colleagues in the Province who have four or five high schools and I think the correlation or the consequence is the destruction of education: If you have five high schools, you do not know your students, you cannot prepare for classes, you cannot assess adequately; and, this is what is happening. Jacaranda did not split teaching hours, which would potentially provide hourly work to more educators. The school administration thought this workforce arrangement best for education. Teachers want to work in as few schools as possible too. Teachers who did not have that work arrangement actively sought to consolidate their hours at as few schools as possible to limit travel. Most also wanted to be a part of the history of an institution.

How We Get Work  41 They wanted to be like Carmen Barral, who had been teaching history and geography at Jacaranda for 35 years. Teachers do not want to be “taxi teachers” or “sparrow teachers” [profesores golondrinas] as Mario Macaya refers to his manner of flying among 10 schools. Rather teachers want uncomplicated commuting and weekly schedules; they want to save money on a streamlined commute; and, they want to be a part of a school community (see Robert, 2013). Perhaps they all want to arrive at school happy, as a geography teacher at Jacaranda confided. Jacaranda’s administrators knew this and struggled to recruit and maintain quality teachers who were willing to dedicate to the school and in return they got full-time work, planning time, and a school with its own policies and ideas of education work (Roellke & Rice, 2008). When Espina began working, schools were short-staffed. They needed teachers for a rapidly expanding system of secondary education. In fact, when she first set out looking for work in 1986, she simply needed to put her name on a list at the schools in her neighborhood and soon thereafter received her first teaching positions. Espina acknowledges that the hiring system has increasingly been centralized as the number of teachers being “turned out of the [teacher training] institutes with light training” increases. Polanco states that entering the teaching profession is much different in 1996 than the first decade of the 21st century. The government advertises for teachers to fill all the hours in new high schools. He also clarifies that his reasoning for entering the teaching profession turns on the need to have a paid job with benefits to support his family. Polanco describes his entrance into the teaching profession as representative of the moment. Many persons who entered the profession in the early to mid-1990s did so because they needed to work, which he suggests is different from previous generations of teachers who entered for vocational reasons, a calling. This is a half-truth as historical research has revealed women did not enter teaching in the past because of a calling; they entered it because like Polanco, they lacked opportunities for education, work, and perhaps career growth or advancement. Yet this myth is a powerful one, shaping who enters the profession or, once entered, who belongs. It legitimates “the teacher,” as someone who professes a calling. Only one of the men, Lautaro Morales mentioned that he wanted to be a teacher from when he was young. However, even that confession was tempered by his acknowledgement that he had few to no other options for postsecondary education or work as a woking-class man in the early 21st century.

Teacher Categories Do Not Equate to Stability Paula Albertini is tenured, but at another high school. For over a decade, she had been a provisional teacher fulfilling Sofia Corti’s full-time hours at Jacaranda. As long as Corti remained the school’s director, Albertini remained at Jacaranda. If Albertini returned to her other school, she would displace the

42  How We Get Work provisional educator who had been working at the same teaching position for a decade. This was a common occurrence across provincial boundaries. Schedules are in a regular state of flux as substitute positions end or are taken away by teachers with more seniority. “It’s a volatile labor arrangement,” Esteban Polanco explains. He is currently a substitute principal at Pampas. His permanent teaching hours were not forfeited to take the administrative post, but rather farmed out as substitute work for other teachers. POLANCO: Effectively, you are fulfilling another’s responsibility . . . but if at any time the tenured person wishes to return to their work, because another position ends or for whatever motive, they have the right to come to their job and relieve you of your duties. SAR:  How much notice do tenured educators give before they return to their position? POLANCO: That depends on the good will and urbanity of the tenured professional. . . . No, no, the system does not anticipate the substitution, the tenured educator has the right [to their work], and in this case, the tenured school principal could have returned to his position this afternoon at one o’clock and I automatically would have been dismissed from my duties. Sometimes this occurs, especially with teachers, sometimes it occurs. SAR:  So that means you have work that is being fulfilled by substitutes right now? POLANCO: The chain reaction. I, automatically, if this was to happen . . . if the tenured educator returns to their position for which I have been substituting, I would cease to be the substitute teacher. Esteban Polanco’s tenured hours were filled by several newer, untenured teachers at Jacaranda like Morales. He was not teaching his full course schedule while acting as the provisional school director. The tenured school director, Roberto Acosta, was working in the Ministry of Education. The domino effect that the work arrangements represent is palpable. It represents instability and uncertainty for many workers. The hiring structure allows for instability, and for years at a time, maintains instability and movement of teachers, seemingly from one day to the next. There is the possibility for professional growth, as in the case of Polanco, but also the ever-present uncertainty. The teacher at the end of that chain of domino movements is out of work too. Teachers become dominoes. Education work and education of youth becomes a game of chance and instability because at any time teachers may fall out of the system while their students adjust to a new teacher.

How We Get Work  43

New/Inexperienced Teachers and the Instability and Flexibility of Work Public high schools have multiple sessions (morning, afternoon, and evening) lasting approximately 4.5  hours. High school sessions are further divided into teaching hours. Untenured teachers can be and are contracted to teach one hour or one class in a school, another hour and class in another school, and so on up to a maximum of 30 hours a week. There is, that I am aware of, no maximum number of schools where one can take hours. Teachers in this study referred to the urban myths of taxi teachers working in 11 different schools. Of the participants in this study the range was from one school to ten. While all teachers in this study desire full-time work, Echeverria, Morales, Gomez, Macaya, and Morino pieced together hours. However, Echeverria, Morales, and Gomez did not have full time hours. None were tenured. This flexible structure represents a feminine work arrangement with a short workday or the “option” to work just a few paid hours, teachers— presumably mothers—could then be home to fulfill their reproductive and familial responsibilities. As with labor around the world, this flexible structure has intensified the work of the women and men who must shuttle physically, financially, and emotionally/psychologically between multiple places of employment. This labor arrangement is depicted by Macaya in the following description of two different workdays. His response is to my request to describe a typical workday. MACAYA: Mondays are the days I  work the least, I  get [to Pampas] at 9:45 a.m., leave at 12:00; come back at 1:00 until 3:15 and then I am free until 8: 55 p.m.. SAR:   You come back?! MACAYA: Until 10:00 at night. Why don’t I  like this day? Because it’s the day my wife is on call 24 hours at the hospital. (His wife is an obstetrician.) I take her to the hospital in the morning. Take [my son] to school, 7:30 a.m. I leave him at school, come home, my wife leaves at 7:50. I stay at home with [my daughter] and around 8:30 I  go to my mother-in-law’s house with [my daughter], someone has to go get my son from school and take him to my mother-in-law’s; I arrive and I see them for a while, before one, or 12:30 and it is a struggle, “Pa, you are leaving again!” And, afterwards I go, return at 3:15, I am with them a little while in the afternoon and I go, then after a while I go to get them . . . when I arrive at 10:00 at night they are sleeping, the two of them and I take the two of them home. Until the next day when, Tuesday, because my wife leaves [the hospital] at 8 a.m. Tuesday, I leave at 7:30, then there is Tuesday. I  have to leave. I  have to call my mother-in-law to come and get the kids . . . that is the worst day. Horrible. The

44  How We Get Work other busy day is Thursday, right? I  start at 7:30, leave one school and go to another until 1:00 p.m.. I get home at 1:40, or around there and I am home till 3:40, I get to Pampas at 4:00 p.m.. Start here, leave here and I go to Palacio and I get there at 7:00 p.m. because I leave at 6:20 p.m. till 10:00 p.m.. SAR:   You chose these days as typical. Two busy days. Why? MACAYA: No. Thursday doesn’t seem bad to me. Monday seems bad because I have to leave my children. And my wife is not around. When your wife is at home it’s another story.

Getting Work Hours New teachers are contracted on an hourly basis to teach particular classes, and classes are “won” in a bingo or raffle-ticket style at public work fairs. MORALES:  Come to a public job fair to see how we win [work] hours! ALVAREZ:   This Saturday morning. I attended public job fairs where teaching hours were redistributed to qualified educators. These newer teachers (fewer than five years of experience) hoped to get more teaching work than they currently had. “It was not always so difficult to group together hours and earn tenure,” Alberto Membrives confided. Now, to even win an hour, a teacher must know when a forum is scheduled, be available to attend the forum (e.g. not have work during that time frame), have the money to travel, have the money to pay for photocopies of the work available, and be on the official point list. Granted, if a teacher does not have work, she/he may have time and an incentive to attend the work distribution meeting. Common sense would tell us so. However, a closer look at the process illustrates that money, time, and know-how are required of qualified educators as they maneuver within a complex bureaucracy to obtain work. Even if the educator has the money, time, and know-how, if they are not high on the seniority list their chances of securing hours are quite slim. The current process begins when a history teacher retires or is on leave. The school director contacts district officials. District officials then post the open hours on an official job list that is distributed by purchasing a photocopy from a designated photocopy shop near the scheduled public job fair. The public job fair begins with a district official calling the name of the teacher registered with the district with the most seniority. If the teacher is present at the public job fair, he or she approaches the district official’s table, tells them which hours listed as available on the photocopied jobs he or she wants, and the teaching hours are officially the teacher’s. The officials then announce what hours are no longer available on the list so that the audience can scratch them off. By officially, it

How We Get Work  45 is important to note that the hours are only the teacher’s according to the classification as tenured, provisional, or substitute hours. According to Pampas’s directors, they meet the new faculty member the next school day. No other notification is sent to them. They have no control over the decision as to who shows up to teach that next school day. They only hope someone does show up. Public job fairs have been in place since neoliberal reform began in the Province—no more than 10  years, according to Pampas teachers. Before then, teachers seeking their first classes went to district offices and placed their name on the eligibility list and, more importantly, they went to all the schools where they wished to work, met with the appropriate administrative officials, and were placed on an eligibility list managed in-school. This was considered the most effective means of securing teaching hours. The hiring system was not centralized. Margarita Echeverria, Isabel Gomez, and Lautaro Morales gained and lost substitute and provisional hours throughout this study. Morales and Gomez did not have any tenured hours during this study, so the loss of work presented a financial hardship. Any loss in working hours also represented a setback toward building seniority toward tenured hours. As a young, single woman with no children, Isabel Gomez had the flexibility to pick-and-choose teaching hours against what was the most elaborate criteria list of all the teachers. For example, Gomez cautiously selected small classes, ideally 25 students, to minimize some of her homework. Selection criteria, in part, evolved from her mother’s warnings about her career choice. “If you work at a business, you will work eight to five, but then you will leave your work at the office. With teaching, mi hija, you will go to work and the work will follow you home.” Her mother’s warning touches on issues of a pending double burden, of the expectation that her daughter would marry a man, have children, and a home of her own. Expectations of sexuality, of life trajectory, and of a set division of public and private labor are embedded here. (Gomez lived at home still, a common practice amongst Argentines who are attending postsecondary schooling, not married; it is the case among young couples too. This is not to be confused with the more recently dubbed boomerang child in the United States who leaves the “nest” after high school for years or decades and then returns. There is no cultural expectation that a child flies from home upon graduation from high school or even college.)

WORKING HOURS IN AND OUT OF THE CLASSROOM

Hora Cátedra and Hora Reloj Teachers are paid monthly, and there is a set monthly minimum that a fulltime teacher must be paid. However, teachers’ work expectations are set

46  How We Get Work by the hour. Jacaranda teachers were paid to be, in their words, in front of the class [frente del aula] for forty minutes for each hour of pay received. The remaining 20 minutes of the hour were used for a multitude of tasks, including grading student work, lesson planning and preparation, testing, and meeting with students. The time also is used to go to the restroom, eat, gather materials, and move on to the next class or school. This system is called, Hora Cátedra. Teachers consistently defined this as one hour of paid work that includes only 40 minutes of teaching. The Ministry of Education defines the arrangement as 40 to 50 minutes of teaching (2006, p. 16). Prior to provincial adaptations of the Federal Education Law (FEL) in 1995, all teachers in this study were paid Hora Cátedra. In 1995, when the Province of Buenos Aires passed into law its version of the Federal Education Law, “Modulos” [Modules] or Hora Reloj [Clocked Hour], replaced the Hora Cátedra. Teachers were to be paid, as the colloquial term suggests, for 60 minutes to teach 60 minutes. The shift is an increase in work time and is meant to improve quantity and quality of instruction for Province students. From teachers’ perspectives the shift signals 20 minutes more of work in front of the class each hour with no extra pay. Province teachers’ would have to do all the other work on their own time and their own dime.

Teacher Homework Teachers with long or complicated commutes experienced a significant increase in unpaid work as the following exchange illustrates. ALVAREZ: In the last few years my time is dominated by work. Perhaps my case is unique because I don’t have a nuclear family; for those who have a husband and children it’s much more complicated. However, even though I  am single, my free time is practically . . . look, I have to grade all this. I do not do this in the classroom, during my [paid] work hour. I have to do it in my time outside of work. It takes me hours to do this work at home . . . which would be my free time because all that time they do not pay me. Free time is very limited, very limited. This kept getting worse in the last few years. SAR:   Why did it get worse? ALVAREZ: Well, because now there is more concern about losing work, losing hours. Also, what happens is that maybe you have the same number of work hours, but they are more draining, this makes one tired too. Monica had mentioned the foot-high stack of papers sitting on her Formica kitchen table when I called to confirm our meeting. In that conversation

How We Get Work  47 she said that she would be at home waiting for me because she would be grading all weekend long. I  then inquired whether she would attend a national teachers’ march on congress to which she said no and reiterated that she would use her day off to grade her stack of papers. Instead of participating in the march or other political activities related to collective demands to increase national spending on public education, Monica would catch up on her schoolwork. Maria Romina Astudillo worked the least amount of hours at Jacaranda, 30 hours per week. However, she assured me that she worked more than full time hours to fulfill her teaching responsibilities. The other hours were unpaid as she graded papers, planned field trips to cultural sites around the city to enhance her history classes, and co-planned a team-taught class with the art teacher. The extra time her position demanded was particularly on her mind when we met in June near the end of the first trimester of classes. When asked how many hours she put in on her longest workday, she told me she did not want to limit her answer to the in-school labor she performed and so she added four more hours to reflect this unpaid time; her longest day was 12 hours long, while her shortest was six. Having consolidated hours in one school also brought with it the ability to further consolidate teaching or class times into several days. Over the years, Rubinstein moved all of her classes to just three days. Her teaching days were long, 12 to 14 hours long! However, she preferred this arrangement because it gave her full days at home to grade and to plan classes. In a sense, her stable work hours within one school community provided flexibility to craft work days. However, the flexibility “freed” her time and energy to fulfill all facets of teaching—those performed in front of students in the classroom that are acknowledged and paid and those completed when no students were present, outside school hours, and were unpaid. DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS: GETTING QUALITY AND QUALIFIED TEACHERS UNDER CONTROL Teachers’ experiences and perspectives of professional education and the organization of work echo a history that was dominated by middle-class women. Men taught, but in smaller numbers than women. That changed slightly with neoliberal reform of the economy and the state. Also revealed in the findings is the manner in which teachers’ policy engagements require them to rethink the boundaries around their work and life. Deeply embedded divisions of labor in the labor market and in the home surface. Here I  discuss the findings in relation to notions of quality and qualified that prompt reform. I attempt to put the history of teaching and teacher experiences/perspectives in conversation to articulate quality and qualified.

48  How We Get Work

Quality Teachers’ experiences of teacher education and workforce entry are chaotic, better, or more easily understood if we focus on the individual’s experiences. No longer do those who identify as high school history teachers possess the same curriculum (albeit learned, experienced, imparted differently). They do not work the same amount for the same pay during a similarly structured workday. Scholars have cited the tendency of neoliberal reforms to emphasize the individual. The need to free the neoliberal subject to pursue goals rationally, but more importantly based on decision-making, presumably made in isolation from any others’ concerns or any concerns of a contextual nature. Teachers’ approaches to teacher education and to finding work are personal decisions, but are made in relation to divisions of labor within the profession and private life. Their decisions are partially explained by the history of teaching. The men in this study acknowledged that their professional preparation was not quality and that curricular reform and privatization weakened the quality of preparation in the Province further. Despite this, they needed jobs when no jobs were available. They could enter teaching easily and quickly get paid work. They were qualified, but their quality did not compare with their “older women” colleagues and they knew it. The men lacked the content knowledge, the creativity, and the capacity to innovate; all pieces of what Shulman (1986) would refer to as pedagogical content knowledge. The women too felt that their preparation was not perfect. They lacked pedagogical knowledge and experience. All of these shortcomings should be viewed as elements toward improving the quality of teacher education. Unfortunately, they were not noted in teacher education reforms. The “older women” (and the younger ones too!) had conflicts negotiating the boundaries around work and life. At times the tensions were related to balancing the expectations of women in the home with those of teaching. However, at other times, the tensions involved negotiating the sudden invisibility of work no longer paid for and pushed into the home. None of the men talked about this conundrum. Somehow they managed to balance (or perhaps they did not have grading to do?). Is it because they had different responsibilities in the home? Only Macaya discussed the problem, one day of the week, when he did not get work done because he had to shuttle his two small children around. The rest of the week, his wife and mother-in-law managed these tasks. The conflicts that emerged from unequal institutionalized divisions of labor can have an impact on teacher quality. As noted in teacher commentary, they did the invisible work. When they had the ability, they reorganized their work hours to do their homework. However, not all teachers can do this. Quality instruction suffers. The state may change paid work arrangements and the hiring process to improve quality, but it has not. Producing quality teachers costs money. The privatization of teacher institutes transfers some of that cost from the state to entrepreneurs. However

How We Get Work  49 the teachers measure cost differently and qualitatively. Teachers are not prepared to a high standard of quality and to cultivate the social capacity of youth (Connell 1995; Reid 2003). Quality is lowered in the teachers’ eyes because less well-trained teachers are part of the market and they are spread out across numerous schools, making it difficult to create meaningful connections with their students. The increased workload implies less individual attention to students and student work, and level of education standards are being supplanted by other metrics to graph educational success. Quality is not well-defined or worse, is ignored. The teachers with quality preparation and without it have the same definition. They await a definition from the state.

Qualified The urgency of the “older” men’s job search is the result of massive privatization of state industry and the deindustrialization of Argentina. It is not that they were flailing around as vagabonds and finally needed a teaching gig to feed themselves and a family. Their entry into teaching, push toward teaching, was orchestrated at a structural level and facilitated by structural changes that created access for them. Bowles and Gintis (1977) so many years ago claimed that education functions for the benefit of the economy. This claim has been rigorously critiqued for decades. Still, here, we see that education functions in unique ways for and within the economy. Teaching work becomes an option for railroaders and for younger working-class men who lack opportunities to enter the private sector or most of the public sector workforce. I hope mention of Bowles and Gintis’ disputed assertions raises eyebrows. It should, for different reasons. In many national settings, the purpose of education is being aligned to meet the needs of the knowledge economy or the needs of employers. In the United States, parents of school aged children are to be reassured that with passage and “implementation” of the College and Career Readiness and the Common Core, our kindergartners are being primed for a future employer every day. Being qualified has cachet in everyday discourse, but serves a questionable purpose. Reformed and some new teacher education institutes are an example of the negotiations across state/economic/social arenas. Working-class men live close to them and need to earn a salary quickly; they are convenient to reach and meet their economic priorities. The newness of the institutions also allows for a branding, of sorts, as teacher education for men. This stands in stark contrast to the embedded identity of the century-old teacher education institutes where the women in the study feel welcome and well served. Their numbers have precipitously dropped in the second decade after neoliberal reform. Whether “qualified teaching” will be synonymous with the image of a man is unclear. Still, the upheaval during initial years of neoliberal reform and the persistence of economic insecurity for a large

50  How We Get Work percentage of the population may continue to engender the symbolic image of the teacher qualified to educate for a new Argentina. Finally, the opening up of teacher education options coupled with a complicated access route to work suggests a surplus of workers. This is a public labor market (though there is a private educational labor market, which I  do not explore). Still the public labor market benefits from similar economic conditions as the private one. The surplus of teachers becomes a commodity and a means to potentially leverage more change in the educational labor market. There is a possibility of more control of workers. There has also clearly been a dilution of qualified workers and in a short time frame. So, seen from a labor process perspective the (re)forms introduced into the teaching occupation under the guise of quality and qualified have less to do with quality or improved education. What remains uncertain—though not to some of the teachers—is the motivation for such dramatic changes to teaching. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we learn that reforms equate to more teacher education programs to choose from, long lists of required credentials, and the elaborate maze new, untenured teachers run through in order to get into a classroom. Neither women nor men entering the profession can avoid this extensive labor involved in apply to apply for work. However, women and men have differing approaches and deploy variations of femininities and masculinities linked to teaching work and the symbolic image of “the teacher” to negotiate teacher preparation, the labor market, and professional identity. While reforms are rolled out one after another after another as if disconnected, they are not. Changes to one area have implications in another for the institutions and individuals that form them. Education reforms have a varied ripple effect on teachers. And this is particularly true in geographic areas where teachers fluidly cross interstate or provincial boundaries to work and where some provinces adopt reforms while others do not. Waves of reform do not erase what Bourdieu (1998) refers to as the “old regime.” The teachers and general public still acknowledge how the education system has worked for 100 years, although not perfectly; however, they remember what did work and question changes to the parts of the system that were not broken and in need of fixing. This chapter also suggests that teachers are not only navigating history but also experience persistent inequality in the divisions of labor that are firmly institutionalized and enacted. The organization of teachers and their work around these ideals raises important questions for education policy makers to consider if the goal is to prepare quality educators and then provide them a conduit toward classrooms.

How We Get Work  51 REFERENCES Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4(2), 139–158. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Acts of resistance: Against the new myths of our time. London: Polity Press. Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1977). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Connell, R.W. (1995). Masculinities, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Dirié, C. & Oiberman, I. (1999). La inserción laboral de los docentes en la Argentina [Teachers’ labor insertion in Argentina]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ministry of Education. Fischman, G. (2000). Imagining teachers: Rethinking gender dynamics in teacher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Mausethagen, S. (2013). Accountable for what and to whom? Changing representations and new legitimation discourses among teachers under increased external control. Journal of Educational Change, 14(4), 423–444. Ministerio de Educación. (2006). Censo Nacional de Docentes 2004 [National Teacher Census 2004]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Author Morgade, G. (1992). El determinante de género en el trabajo docente de la escuela primaria [The gender determinant in primary school teachers’ work]. Unpublished manuscript. Morgade, G. & Bellucci, M. (1997). Mujeres en la educación: Género y docencia en Argentina, 1870–1930 [Women in education: Gender and teaching in Argentina, 1870–1930]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Minõ y Dávila. Puiggrós, A., (Ed.). (1996). La educación en las provincias (1945–1985). [Education in the provinces (1945–1985)]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Galerna. Reid, A. (2003). Understanding teachers’ work: Is there still a place for labour process theory? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(5), 559–573. Rendón, L. I. (2002). Community college puente: A validating model of education. Educational Policy, 16(4), 642–667. Robert, S. A. (2013). Incentives, teachers, and gender at work. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 21(31), 1–25. doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v21n31.2013 Roellke, C.  & Rice, J. K. (2008). Responding to teacher quality and accountability mandates: The perspective of school administrators and classroom teachers. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 7, 264–295. Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14.

3 Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures in a Meaningless Reform

INTRODUCTION The reorganizations of curriculum and schools are two ways in which neoliberal reform has aimed to hold teachers accountable for the education of all students. Curricular changes speak to the global trend to align national educational outcomes with nations on the other side of the world, reinforced by the popularity of international tests such as PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS. Yet what is reorganized at the national and local levels does not always align with, or reflect global discourses. Oftentimes, it makes little sense to teachers how such moves improve quality in education, especially when your subject area is not favored by those tests and especially when the reforms are not experienced as supportive of teaching work. This chapter examines teachers’ reactions to and negotiations of national reform guidelines adopted by the Province of Buenos Aires but not the City of Buenos Aires that call for a restructuring of elementary and secondary schools. Two grades—and the students and teachers within them— get shifted from high schools to elementary schools. High school teachers (called profesoras) become elementary maestras. The shift in workplace was accompanied by a blending of subject knowledge. History, geography, and civics become social studies. The shift and blend reform decreases the number of hours of history teaching work available when two years of teaching history (geography, civics) are eliminated. There is an appearance of more work as social studies classes must be taught in primary schools, and there are more primary schools than high schools. Furthermore, the social studies teaching work has less rigid requirements than the high school teaching work. There is more competition for the work; it is not only history and geography teachers vying for their previous jobs, but also newly trained primary teachers and anyone with a particular university degree, whether or not they have any teacher preparation. In this chapter, I argue that curriculum reform and the reorganization of primary and secondary schools manipulates the gendered hierarchy of teaching in ways that do not enhance the presumed aim of the reform to improve quality. High school teachers are dislodged from their professional

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  53 titles and the physical spaces where they work (high schools). Simultaneously, a curricular reform denies them their professional knowledge. This interactive process is reflective of Acker’s (1990) second of five processes (i.e., the construction of symbols and images) on gender work, workers, and work organizations. Masculine and feminine titles assigned to teaching complicate teachers’ negotiation of the structural changes. Worse, the teachers must navigate the reform along with persons seeking to take their work. The question that hangs over this process is whether a dumbing down of the teaching force and a weakened history, geography, and civic education matters because international tests do not measure history or democratic-civic literacy. At each turn of the reform negotiation, former high school history teachers also are confronted with a disregard for their knowledge and skills and a general public’s eagerness to overlook them to get a few hours of work in a tight labor market. This leaves another question hanging over the reform process: What exactly was the aim overall? While speaking to the specificity of the Argentine reform, this interactive process mirrors reform in other national contexts. Similar reorganizations of knowledge and schools continue as literacy and math and sometimes science are privileged above all other knowledge forms in order to improve student test results. In Buffalo, NY, where I resided at the time this book was completed, the school board has voted to “phase out” four more city schools labeled as “failing.” The board of education is following US federal guidelines for “turning around” schools. The schools continually do not post the externally-set expectations for proficiency on standardized tests. Schools are “phased out.” Where phased out students and their tenured teachers will go is unclear. What is clear in this US instance and in the Argentine instance, is that teachers’ work and what they know are labeled as deficient, failing or insufficient, or no longer legitimized by the state. To borrow a term from corporate and market vernacular: teachers become redundant. The data reveal that teachers read and negotiate the curricular reforms and school restructuring through the gendered hierarchy of the teaching profession. Teachers working in the City are not directly affected by the reform. Despite having teacher credentials in social studies, men avoid the reform, remaining in high schools where they teach history and are profesores. However, women teachers at Pampas lose work and/or must retrain to keep it. All teachers are concerned about the indirect impact on their classroom work as students move from Province to City classrooms. They also are concerned about the broader implications to professional identity when their secondary teaching colleagues and the knowledge that provides prestige and differentiation from primary school teachers is so blatantly disregarded. The blurring of the line signals a disregard and a devaluation of professional identity. This is detailed in the coming pages. The chapter continues with a more comprehensive overview of the law followed by an introduction to professional terms that is part of the

54  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures tangible framework buttressing the gendered hierarchy. The findings are organized into two sections. One focuses on “protected” teachers’ perspectives of the reform. The other focuses on “unprotected” teachers and how they negotiated the shift in work, professional title, and the expectation of being retrained. Their negotiation reveals the ways they attempt to maintain their distance from primary teachers. Teachers’ critiques are not limited to the reform. They question the rationale for such reforms in relation to the purpose of education. A third section reveals these findings. In the discussion I revisit the ways that gendered policy enactments intertwine with the gendered occupational hierarchy. I conclude by suggesting the need to revisit the reform goals. So many questions are raised about whether or not quality or improvements emerged in schools. Rather, the findings from the study and their discussion suggest that the reform has little if anything to do with improving education. Perhaps there are good intentions. However, the focus on quality and improvement in neoliberal reform discourse seems more like a smoke screen that obscures what is really happening. In the process, responsibility for failed reforms is dubiously misplaced. STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENTS FOR EDUCATION The national government passed a new Federal Education Law in 1993, a second dramatic reform to the 100-year public education system. While there were reforms at local levels over the century, these two reforms in the 1990s were quite dramatic. And they were made all the more dramatic because they came along with other dramatic reforms of the economy and of the welfare state. The Federal Education Law was passed on the heels of the completed process of the decentralization of financial and administrative authority of high schools from federal to provincial authorities. (Primary schools were decentralized in the 1970s.) Decentralization was heralded as a process that would democratize education by shifting decision-making power to provincial and local authorities. The Federal Education Law, which followed on its tails, aimed to improve educational quality. It called for dramatic changes. The most important to this study of teachers’ work is a new structure for elementary and secondary schools and curricular changes. The pre-reform school structure consisted of seven years of primary school (grades 1–7 in light gray) and five years of secondary schooling (secondary grades 1–5 in dark gray). The post-reform school structure calls for 4 three-year cycles. The first 9 years and 3 cycles are compulsory primary school. They are referred to as “EGB” for Educacíon General Básica [Basic General Education] (grades 1–9, in light gray). One three-year cycle becomes secondary education (years 1–3, in dark gray). The new education law also introduces a new social studies curriculum for the last three years of primary school. Prior to the law, the teachers in this study teach history classes only. Teachers had no experience or preparation

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  55 Table 3.1  Pre- and Post-Reform Educational System Age

3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Pre- reform Pre K Pre K K 1 2 3 4 5 Post-reform Pre K Pre K K 1 2 3 4 5

6 6

7 7

1 8

2 9

3 1

4 2

5 3

in social studies. They studied to teach high school history, taking more history courses than undergraduate history majors in US colleges. And history is taught in high schools alongside geography, for example. It is important to recall decentralization’s objective of devolving school control to local communities. Thus while a new structure is proposed by the national government, provinces and large municipalities like the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires may decide whether or not to adopt and adapt it. The City of Buenos Aires decides not to adopt a single part of the new education law and cites its authority to do so. In 1996, the Province of Buenos Aires’ government adopts every facet of the law and draws out implementation over 10 years. It is important to clarify that the school structure as a result of this law begins to vary throughout the nation. Other provinces adopt and adapt the Federal Education Law differently. I am only referring to the City of Buenos Aires and the Province of Buenos Aires. In the first decade after the national law was passed, teachers, government, and parents agreed that the reform was a failure; it did not improve educational quality and equality. This consensus of opinion led to a new, revised Federal Education Law (26.206) approved in December 2006. The new law passed by the national government as the Province of Buenos Aires completes its education reform based on the first national law’s suggestions. A new federal education law did not inspire the Province of Buenos Aires to reverse course on the reforms at the center of this chapter. FRAMED BY LANGUAGE: THE GENDERED HIERARCHY OF TEACHING This book is written from the standpoint that all occupations and their workers are gendered, but that there is an ongoing, interactive process by which gendering occurs. Teaching is no different, and teachers actively negotiate the feminine and masculine identities embedded in a professional hierarchy. The top-down hierarchy is “graded” by the age of children taught, by curricular knowledge, the number of women teaching, required uniform or clothing, and by required professional preparation. Castellano, or Spanish, is Argentina’s dominant and official language and provides an important means by which the gendered hierarchy is further maintained. Not only are there feminine and masculine terms for teachers, there are three different words for teacher—docente, maestra/o, and profesora/o. At the bottom of the hierarchy are maestras and maestros, who

56  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures teach the youngest of children, preschool and primary grades. Until 2008 maestras’ professional education was shorter than their secondary counterparts by one year. Prior to the increased length, this truncated preparation served as a concrete justification for lower prestige; the teachers had less professional education. The maestras’ knowledge, skills, and capacities, in the most egregious cases, are ignored or equated with a false notion that such professional capacities stem from the natural capacity of women to care for small children. The majority of maestras are women, which is also why I deploy the feminine form of the word. They also traditionally wear a uniform that matches the students,’ whether just an apron matching their grade-level’s color in preschools, or whether a white laboratory coat worn in elementary schools. Profesoras and profesores teach high school and at university. In Argentina before the reform, high school teachers were educated in public normal schools with a minimum of four years of intensive study of history, historiography, and pedagogy. In the previous chapter, teachers discussed both public and private teacher education. Normal schools, the traditional teacher education institutes, are considered to provide the most rigorous forms of preparation for the classroom. While high school and university educators share the same title, they are not considered equals based on different professional education and responsibilities. University professors are presumed to have studied at university and in most cases obtained an advanced degree such as a master’s degree or doctorate. The few profesoras who did study at university for their initial teacher education are revered for their knowledge of content and pedagogy (Espina at Pampas and Barral at Jacaranda). They are the teachers whom the others recommend observing in their classroom and who are referred to as models to emulate or at least learn from. Furthermore, university professors are presumed to be engaged in research and to teach. Research as a professional activity was highly regarded by the teachers as long as it did not focus on teaching or pedagogy. Agostini explains, “how can an educational research describe what I am doing, the skills/capacities, and knowledge I weave together to teach, if I cannot explain it myself!” Furthermore, educational policy researchers were equally scorned, except if they were telling teachers’ stories. The terms for teachers buttress masculine and feminine notions of skills and knowledge that are imbued with power and prestige. The power dynamic represented in the distinct terminology situates elementary teachers at the bottom and high school teachers at the top. The work of maestras/ maestros in elementary schools is considered more feminine, offering less professional prestige than profesoras/profesores working in high schools.

Protected From Reform Jacaranda’s all women history profesoras did not have to confront the gendered hierarchy governing prestige within their profession because the City

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  57 did not adopt the national education reform. They continued to teach high school students history. In a sense, when the City chose not to reform schools it protected its (mostly women) high school history teachers. This changed during the study with the election of a right-leaning and pro-business mayor, first in 2007 and then again in 2011. Nevertheless, at Jacaranda, the teachers knew that public education was in decline. They were worried. They were considered one of the few neighborhood high schools that still served a broad socioeconomic spectrum. The first day of the 2005 school year, Corti thanked the students and their parents for choosing Jacaranda and public education. She acknowledged that they have a choice. The Buenos Aires middle class continues to flee public education and more private institutions open up. Why is unclear. Fischman (2001) writes that the private school advantage appeared to be unfounded when the amount of independence and funding is accounted for in all but the most elite schools. Just because Jacaranda teachers were protected from the reforms does not mean they did not have critiques of the reforms and policy makers. Maria Laura Paulson questioned whether policy makers and researchers ever dared to enter the classroom. “[Policy makers and educational researchers] do not enter the classroom when the door is closed and one is left with the chalk and eraser . . . to teach, to educate.” She invited them to try entering the classroom. She was sure they would run away, and if they did not would, at least, come up with different research results and recommendations. “For now, research and publications exist only for those who do not work in classrooms.” Paulson challenged them to shadow teachers into and out of the classroom. Agostini was not as confrontational in her dislike for policy or research. Rather she questioned how a researcher could summarize her work when she herself had a hard time putting her finger on the skill she acquired only through years of practical on-the-job training. Albertini, on the other hand, was willing to listen to policy makers and researchers if they had paid their dues in the classroom first. While all the Jacaranda educators took continuing education courses during this study, only Corti, the director, conducted research and saw a mutually beneficial relationship between teaching and research. For the rest, policy and research results were far too distant from their teaching work. For now policy and the research on which it was purportedly based did not affect them.

Pampas Pampas teachers were forced to confront the gendered hierarchy of professional titles and knowledge. They had to decide whether to maintain teaching hours that moved from Pampas to primary schools in the area. First and second year history teachers’ work hours moved to a different location and a different educational level. Three women, Alejandra Espina, Margarita

58  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures Echeverria, and Monica Alvarez followed their work. Before the reform, the lower grades at Pampas were only taught by women.

No Maestros None of the male participants worked in primary schools. When I asked Lautaro Morales whether he would seek such work, he shook his head in a resolute, No. I mentioned that he was the only teacher who had completed a social studies teacher education program. He reiterated that indeed he had a teacher certification in social studies. However, he specialized in history. Morales had the least amount of teaching hours of all participants. Yet he chose not to pursue work in EGB 3 [Educación General Básica Tercer Cicol, General Basic Education third Cycle] despite his inability to obtain more high school work. SOCIAL STUDIES TRAINING Teachers who wished to keep their work hours had to obtain social studies training to be qualified to stay with their hours. They employed a variety of strategies for negotiating this reform dilemma. Echeverria was particularly concerned that as a high school history teacher she was not qualified to teach social studies. She took the curricular shift seriously, seeking further training in geography. Echeverria—I am working in seventh, eighth, and ninth [grades] in EGB [3]. I had to have extra training because I am a high school history teacher to teach social sciences, to teach history, geography, and civics. High school history teachers do well with civics, but with geography, from my most sincere heart, physical geography, I don’t know it nor am I interested in knowing it. But it was a question of responsibility: I had to have training, which I completed in the Capital, because the courses in the Province are not good. (Group Interview, March 3, 2005) Echeverria avoided becoming a social studies maestra, choosing to augment her history knowledge with geography, which qualified her to teach the new curriculum. She strategically chose to study in the City too, not in the Province. She lives in the City so it was convenient. She also avoids the less prestigious, new social studies training. Last, she avoids the less prestigious provincial educational institutions. Echeverria’s negotiation nevertheless qualifies her to teach social studies. She found a dynamic way to resist what many teachers considered a dumbing-down of their professional knowledge by augmenting her extensive discipline-specific knowledge. Choosing a disciplinary route to social studies preparation backed by City training, she maintained a symbolic

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  59 distance from adapting to the reform and becoming a social studies maestra while also keeping her job.

University Education: A Buffer to the Maestra Complex Espina did not voice concern that her work in elementary school conflicted with her preparation or identity as a high school history teacher. In her opinion, it was further differentiation of her teaching skills and knowledge. This, perhaps, can be attributed to her educational history. She was educated as a teacher at the University of Buenos Aires. Her prestige as a universityeducated history profesora was secure regardless of the school level in which she instructed. Another way to understand Espina’s policy posturing is that she had more invested in Educación General Básica 3 (General Basic Education 3 or EGB 3). Espina served as the coordinator for her upper elementary division. It is the only leadership role she had fulfilled and she liked it. She was selected by her elementary school colleagues. However, she voiced concern about her capabilities for overseeing her division now that the provincial government was paying attention to it. In April  2005, the Province announced that beginning with the next school year all EGB 3 divisions would become “schools,” a separate educational level renamed Basic Secondary Education (Educación Secundaria Básica, or ESB). Her concern was that she did not possess the necessary skills to fulfill an official administrative position. Never mind that she had been teaching for nineteen years and coordinating the cycle for seven years, or that she had additional proven leadership skills organizing Pampas community members, or that she possessed a university education. She felt she was not qualified to be an official elementary school director now that the government was intervening, and she was concerned she would not be able to earn, through a public competition, her current job.

Poor Social Studies Training Teachers such as Echeverria, who lost work hours, were angered at the ability of maestras to take their work with only a brief and limited training. “The elementary teachers that were in seventh grade [before the reform] that were going to be [in EGB 3] were trained as ‘converted’ elementary teachers, or whatever the name is that was used for them.” In the following excerpt Pampas teachers react to the reduced amount of training required of elementary teachers to qualify for their previous high school teaching positions. ECHEVERRIA:  The same law in Spain, with better preparation, the same law or similar . . . a reform created in Spain with more implementation time, with more money to train

60  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures teachers, did not work. In our [Argentine] case they implemented it in an abrupt manner, with deficientto-poor teacher training, because elementary teachers who completed courses, completed courses that were ridiculous and they trained for more than one [subject] area, something that a [high school] teacher takes four or five years or six years for preparation, an [elementary] teacher did that in one course. MORALES:   . . . in months. ECHEVERRIA:   . . . in months. (. . .) ISABEL GOMEZ: So the problem was who is going to teach this new EGB 3. It occurred to [the government] to train elementary teachers in a summer course. ECHEVERRIA:   It was so short. GOMEZ:  . . . so that the elementary teachers could teach these subjects in the EGB 3. This same criticism is leveled against a summer social studies training the government provided for high school history educators. Espina learned upon arriving at the training that she was not enrolled alongside her peers, professional educators with a university degree. ESPINA: From my point of view it was not good training and on top of it all, what’s more, [it was] a differentiated training because I had a university degree. So I had a more methodological training. They put me with a group where we were all . . . people with university degrees, but I am a history teacher. That is, my preparation was as a teacher. I was with lawyers, with engineers, who do not have training as a teacher. The truth is that it was not a good training and preparation for us . . . for the reform, really. High school history teachers felt their professional identity was under attack. With the curricular reform, the government de-qualified them to teach students and courses they had been teaching just the year before. Then required them to take social studies training to keep their work. Finally, the history teachers potentially had to compete for their work with maestras and anyone with a university degree who completed the crude social studies workshops. Espina’s years of teaching and her prestigious education credentials were seemingly ignored or not apparent to the education ministry in charge of implementing the provincial reform. The poor curriculum training reflected a fragile and waning view of elementary and high schoolteachers as knowledgeable, skilled professionals.

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  61 Men not affected by the structural reform were equally upset by the poor preparation required for the new teaching hours. Macaya has strong criticism of this move: It seems to me that teachers’ work is bastardized, anyone can do it. What’s more, the reform approved whoever can do it, to sit in front of a class of students and teach . . . that’s what happened to us. So, this, when decentralization occurs, for example, creates a ton of vacancies, and the women that were studying business, studying to be a primary teacher, [the government] had them take a shitty class and they suddenly become women high school teachers. Requiring the high school teachers to obtain further training also added injury to insult. Any teachers who wished to follow their work now had extra, unpaid out-of-school work. Although public courses were offered, free-of-charge, teachers incurred added expenses such as transportation and supplies for the program. They also lost a day off because these classes were often scheduled all day Saturday. Indeed, the preparation enabled them to keep their jobs, but they had to, in a sense, re-earn positions they had already been fulfilling, not because they had poor training or were doing a poor job. They had to go to training on their own time and expense to remain employed. PROFESORES WITH ELEMENTARY PROBLEMS Men voiced concern that they were affected by the restructuring in a different way. They suggested that the nature of their high school work changed. They were not protected from some of the very qualities attributed to elementary teaching and which they sought to avoid. In this section, I introduce the concept of infantilization that teachers coined to describe the changing nature of their students’ behavior and, in turn, their labor. Pampas men were increasingly concerned about the psychological and academic development of students who remained in elementary school until they were a minimum 15 years old. Alberto Membrives offered the explanation that the older students should not be playing with six year olds. “The 15-year-old is infantilized. This is not good for the student or their education.” Disciplinary problems associated with this childhood play emerged in the high school classroom, eating into teaching time. Echeverria, a woman, echoed this sentiment. ECHEVERRIA: [Post-reform] first-year students are eminently disorganized; you cannot leave them unattended. If you turn to one student, there are others hitting each other, playing,

62  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures very infantile, incredibly immature. So you are obligated to maintain a permanent type of vigilance that drains me, bothers me. I don’t believe that my function is to supervise student conduct. I should dedicate my time to explaining the subject material, but now I also have to add [discipline] to my obligations. SAR:  When did you begin to add this other task to your teaching work? I think it was gradual and I am trying to remember ECHEVERRIA:  (. . .)  I believe it was in the last six years. . . . I would have to sit down and think precisely because the phenomenon became worse, but it became worse in every sense (. . .) there is something in our daily work that has become deformed and that drains us so much when we should be using our energy to give our classes and give our best, period. [We should not be] struggling with conduct. Teachers at both schools voiced concern over the amount of disciplinary issues they had to deal with in a workday. However, Jacaranda teachers did not observe this in their parallel grades as the Pampas teachers did. City teachers instructing in years three through five had control of their classrooms and focused on history and related study skills. For those teaching the upper high school years at Jacaranda, no change in behavior had occurred. Managing disciplinary problems was not considered a major part of their work with the oldest of students, although at times it was. This was observed in class after class of Jacaranda observations too. On one particular observation, Carmen Barral entered her third-year history classroom to find garbage strewn all over the floor while students sat and chatted nearby. She was not happy with the mess. She also was not happy with the students who had been in the same classroom all day, but had not made any effort to clean up. She immediately yelled out, “Kids, the solution [to a problem] does not always come from somewhere else!” She then explained that the person who cleaned was sick. “Do not become typical Argentine slackers! Don’t complain. Clean up the mess during recess.” During my observations of Barral specifically, I  noted many similar exchanges with third-year students. I also noted that she took the time to teach them how to take notes, look up new words with a dictionary, keep lists of new vocabulary, and highlight text. Jacaranda teachers did have to deal with the situations that Pampas teachers suggested was not part of their job. Albertini gives this example: The skill level of our children is terrifying. I have many first years [students] and there is so much difficulty with elementary skills, in reading,

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  63 in writing, multiplication, maths, general culture, and the history of our country. They do not understand the significance of a single year, not 1810, not 1816, they do not understand the significance of independence, they do not understand the significance of breaking free from Spain, so they come without the tools to resolve what I present to them. . . . My university professors would say the same of me. (laughter) Barral, Albertini, and their colleagues took the time to teach study skills and behavior and to teach history. She, like other Jacaranda teachers in the early grades wove study and basic learning skills into their history teaching. It was, in a sense part of their job. The Jacaranda examples raise questions about Pampas teachers’ infantilization hypothesis. Teaching history prior to the structural reform was portrayed as the most demanding part of their day. This, they believed, reflected the primary purpose of their high school teaching: to teach content, not to teach comportment. Teaching discipline and appropriate behavior for high schools, however, was a part of history classes with first and second year high school students in the old system. Teaching study skills was perhaps not high on their list of teaching skills. Or the teachers who taught the first two years were accustomed to it. Echeverria mentions that she did teach study skills and have to discipline. However, now other teachers are teaching first and second year history and they must deal with discipline and teach study skills. However, they have two fewer years to educate. They may water down curriculum, and less history is being taught. MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY The teachers actively attempt to make sense of the reform and its relation to the national history. As the exchange that follows so clearly illustrates, teaching history provides an understanding of the personal outcomes of neoliberal policies. POLANCO: We will try to link this with why we are teachers, what we do here, what expectations we have. By family tradition, because my dad was a railroad worker I went into the railroad after high school, which is around 18 or 19 years old in Argentina. ALVAREZ:  Excuse me Esteban, you said you were in the railroads. Who was a railroad worker? POLANCO:  My dad. ALVAREZ:   Oh, your dad. POLANCO: My dad, it was common to be a railroad worker’s child. ‘Estebancito, son of the railroad worker.’ (. . .) I did that

64  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures for nine years until I left in 1993. There was an early retirement program, which, in a few words, meant that they offered you money to leave. That way the state cut down on personnel. So I  find myself in a difficult situation in terms of labor, and I want to be honest with my colleagues about why I got into teaching. There is a strong need component, labor need, and I think my case represents a lot of teachers in this province. The situation in Argentina is that, just like the railroads . . . perhaps we speak of the railroads from our own personal experience and maybe we exaggerated a little, right? We should talk about a whole process of the state pulling away from state enterprises and so forth. Within that framework you get, among other things, a rise in the unemployment rate that we are still going through. At that time I was 27, 28, and I didn’t have a job. My wife was a teacher, or about to be, elementary teacher, so I was better off than a lot of my coworkers, at least my wife had a job. So I had to find an alternative in difficult times, where doors were closing, not opening. They were still closing until very recently, even now, depending on whom you ask. ALVAREZ:  The labor history Esteban is giving you is common to almost all of us. That stability that your work gave you, that allowed you to improve your social status, that gave you continuity, you started as a railroad worker and you retired as a railroad worker. POLANCO:  Right, or in the banks or in the telephones. MORALES:   Postal workers. ALVAREZ:  Your labor history was parallel to your personal one, and your children inherited your trade in some way. Now you find the savagery of the flexible labor market, totally deregulated, you find a guy who’s 40, whose labor history includes more than seven jobs, if he’s lucky. In a country with few employment opportunities, the labor aspect is big; this is common to all of us. Alvarez enters the narrative periodically, serving as a sort of narrator for me, the general audience. At first glance, it appears she is not affected directly by the decline of the railroad. Thus, she is just assisting her colleagues as they convey their stories. However, as a white, middle-class woman who has had difficulty securing teaching hours, who is the daughter of a retired elementary teacher, her own life and career possibilities are perhaps the collateral damage that is not present in the narrative. What is happening to women who traditionally would enter the teaching ranks but who enter post-reform?

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  65 Isabel Gomez, like Alvarez, represents the symbolic teacher. However, she is struggling to find her place in the profession both ideologically and physically. She has the least number of hours of all teachers. She is lowest on the seniority list of teachers in this study. During Isabel’s Gomez teacher education program, she realized that the history teachers who captivated her attention and imagination were those who allowed students to participate in class and explained history as a process, not as a set of dates and facts. In addition, she began to think of history classes as inherently different from other subject areas, such as Language. In the history classroom when students were allowed to participate, the classroom could be a space for reflection, for sharing one’s opinion, and for learning differently. These two insights guide her pedagogy. She is finding her teacher persona. However, she lost hours when the reform occurred and has to find a way to navigate the demands of the new labor market arrangement. She is enrolled in a geography certification program at the time of this study, which she finds more satisfying than her history program. She gives several reasons for her preference. The first is that she is attending geography classes during the day when other young people study. Her history program was in the evening when, in her words, only older persons who had families and jobs could attend school. She also finds her geography classmates more social, friendlier. She attributed this to the lack of “strong ideological issues” in geography. “In history, there are political questions, religious questions, or whatever it was that had to do with these people. . . . In geography no, everyone is calmer.” Gomez completed her history-teaching program at Joaquín V. Gonzalez, and she is completing her geography program there too. This is her way of avoiding social studies certification, attempting to find work in the new reform context, and, as you will read about in the next chapter, make up for her inability to go after incentives. Gomez’s concern for avoiding strong ideological issues and her concern for having student voice in her classroom seem contradictory. Yet situated within a professional context of uncertainty, in a context where she needs to perhaps find a new niche so she can get more stable work, her contradictions may open up more doors via elementary social studies classrooms or high school geography classes. Regardless of the professional struggles and classroom struggles, Morales and others continue to believe in the power of education to change society. Polanco may confess that he entered teaching to get a job, but he believes in education and in the power of history to right the national ship. Morales quote below captures their shared sentiments: I believe that due to Argentina’s [economic] position in the world, we need critical teachers, teachers who try to change [the world we live in]. That is, Argentina needs teachers who make this impression on their students. Teachers who offer that possibility [for change] to future citizens.

66  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures There is hope and conviction in this statement, one echoed by other teachers at both schools. Yet this hope is quite fragile. The lack of clear reform goals from teachers’ on-the-ground perspective keeps that hope at bay as the teachers deal with their individual professional concerns.

Isolation from Colleagues and from Purpose Enrique Morino expressed a sense of being isolated intellectually in his teaching work, but stuck for the moment. I had a different vision of this work when I began teaching. . . . I thought that teachers exchanged concepts, that one read, contrasted what they read with their colleagues; when in reality, there is more work than [personal] theoretical development for my colleagues. This makes me feel like I am in a place I don’t belong; this place does not value [intellectual] preparation, but destiny chose this place for me . . . and I continue to fight. So too did Ana Estela Rubinstein. However, her sense of being alone intellectually stems in part from her experience of the last dictatorship (1976–1983). She was dismissed from work and her doctoral program was closed for the duration. Friends were disappeared. Disappeared is the term used to refer to murdered victims of the military, paramilitary, and police forces. It is a political term that speaks to the manner in which the victims were often abducted such that they disappeared from sight. It also speaks to the military government’s and other officials’ denial of any knowledge of the victim when family and friends looked for loved ones, at times suggesting the victim did not exist or disappeared of their own volition. The term has been employed by human rights groups seeking justice for the crimes. The official figures for the number of persons disappeared is approximately 8,000, although the more widely circulated figure stands at 30,000 (Nunca Mas, 1986). Rubinstein still, decades later, describes herself as lacking an intellectual community, particularly at her job. However, as a member of the Jacaranda school community a convenient distance from her home, being of retirement age and the primary breadwinner for an unemployed, aging husband and two grown children (a third was not dependent on her income), she remains in her stable, full-time position at Jacaranda. DISCUSSION Here I revisit the ways gendered policy enactments intertwine with the gendered occupational hierarchy both within the teaching profession and in the broader spectrum of occupations.

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  67 Women in this study already teach the reformed grades and subjects affected by the first federal education law. They were given an ultimatum: get further training or forfeit your work. The three women (Echeverria, Espina, and Alvarez) who lost work when their first- and second-year history classes are moved to primary schools heed the warning. They weigh their training options for obtaining the new social studies credentials. Echeverria enrolls in a geography certification program. Espina, with her university degree, signs up for the summer social studies training course only to find out it was for anyone who possessed a university degree. Alvarez takes the teacher workshop and finds out later that elementary teachers were offered one that required less time to complete. Gomez, knowing there is less work for her teaching high school history, seeks geography certification too. So rather than dedicate her time to building experience and seniority, she is back in the classroom as she is beginning her historyteaching career. Morales, the only teacher with social studies certification, refuses to seek the work. He wants to be a history teacher in high school. He will do with less work for now if that is what the consequence of limiting his selection leads to. For those who shift down to primary schools comes a new title, maestra, and a new curriculum, social studies, as well as new places of work. Teachers negotiate the boundaries around teaching differently depending on: their initial teaching credentials, their need to work, their possibility for more work, and their understanding of what work a high school history teacher was to do. Some men and some women were “protected” from the reform fallout. However, upon closer scrutiny, the men at Pampas who suddenly had to teach first-year high school history classes were confronted with what their female colleagues had always dealt with: maturing the “infantilized” first-year student. This meant a possible change to their teaching: this meant they had to teach skills that the men did not consider to be a part of their job. Women at both schools fulfilled these roles. The reform signaled that the men had to take on some of that role too. The reform demanded more credentials from teachers who had already been doing the work for years. Simultaneously, policy makers allowed unskilled workers to enter the labor market to teach these “new” classes. For those who seek to pursue their moving work, they find themselves competing for their jobs with persons who do not have and most certainly do not exceed their credentials. Competition is created in the labor market. This competition, however, does not reflect a process through which the “best” teacher wins the teaching hours. It just represents more people vying for work hours as the quality of the credentialing process is loosened up. How could a lawyer who completes a summer workshop on social studies teaching be a “better” teacher than Espina, who possess a university degree in history and pedagogy and over a decade of teaching experience? The lawyer and she completed the same social studies workshop and then competed

68  Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures for the same jobs. Again this raises questions regarding the good intentions of such reforms, shifting the onus of responsibility for seeking quality in education away from the failure of the reform from its inception or poorly thought through intentions. Teachers conveyed a sense of uncertainty about a bigger project that education and teaching is supposed to be a part of. Their reflections suggest that as a teacher, part of their professional identity, was to prepare youth for the future. They voiced concerns that they were merely preparing youth as unneeded labor power (Reid, 2003, p. 565). Connell (1995) also has a discussion of this. He says teachers work to develop “the capacity for social practice” (p. 97). Reid (2003) describes this process as helping “students to acquire learning strategies both for themselves as individuals, and to maintain these as a collective property of the society. The capacity for social practice has economic, ideological, and political dimensions. It includes the capacity to labour; capacities for social interaction, involving culture, identity formation and communication; and the ‘capacity for power’, by which he means the capacity to engage responsibly in political life” (Connell 1995, p. 100; quoted in Reid, 2003, p. 565–566). CONCLUSIONS Teachers’ reactions to this dramatic and misunderstood reform are framed around a gendered professional hierarchy that allots power, prestige, and purpose. Everyday language used to distinguish who teaches where, what, to whom, with what professional preparation, and why shape teachers’ decisions about how to negotiate this dramatic shift in professional boundaries. The language of maestra and profesor are not conclusions in and of themselves; rather they are signposts for power, privilege, and symbolic as well as professional identity. The former secretary of education for the Province of Buenos Aires and critical educational researcher Adriana Puiggrós suggests that “we have to reinforce teachers’ identity, assure them that they have the right to teach and a right to teach what they want to . . .” (Veiras, 2005). Puiggrós reaffirms one particular interpretation of the education law, that all members of the school community have their space and their authority. Yet the reform did not do this in practice. It seemed to ignore that a hierarchy and that teaching identities and differentiated knowledge existed. How the reform was enacted seems to have little to do with improving the quality of teaching and concomitantly the quality of education. Instead teachers struggle to maintain their work hours, find more work hours, and to distinguish themselves from their elementary counterparts. It is too easy and lazy to brush off the distinctions between teaching elementary school and being a high school teacher. To have this distinction overlooked and without a clear, well-articulated and supported rationale for doing so demands an explanation. The lack of understanding as to the goals of the reform only

Navigating New Titles, Curriculum, and School Structures  69 reinforce confusion and obscure the possibility that teaching professionals and the state share similar ideas about the purpose of education in a reform context. Furthermore, all teachers are affected by educational reform. While not all are directly related, the changes occurring in one place do inform and affect the teaching profession in other places. The lack of clear rationale behind the restructuring of the schools and curriculum strikes at a deeper logic in neoliberal education reform that results in the kind of incommensurate terminology with respect to “quality.” In this instance, prolonging primary education seems to be almost entirely cost-based; because these teachers work less, more persons with more varied credentials had access to the work hours, and as a consequence, there are potentially more job candidates, increasing competition with the potential for lowering wages and cost. This can only be understood with a reading of Chapter 2, where the reader is introduced to the fractured labor arrangements that exist, with teachers flying between multiple schools to teach just one class. Neoliberal reforms based on market strategies are actually quite myopic. At least, notions of quality are myopic at best and poorly conceptualized at worst. These first two data chapters raise an important concern: Are these educational reforms intended to improve education? From teachers’ views, reforms seem to train a perpetual underclass for menial labor, which a better education might complicate. However, they have hope; they still believe in education as a national project. At least neoliberal reform did not obfuscate that. REFERENCES Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4(2), 139–158. Argentina. National Commission on the Disappeared (1986). Nunca mas: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Fischman, G. (2001). Globalization, consumers, citizens, and the “private school advantage” in Argentina (1985–1995). Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 9(31). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v9n31.html. Reid, A. (2003). Understanding teachers’ work: Is there still a place for labour process theory? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(5), pp. 559–573. Veiras, N. (2005, December 26). Diálogo con Adriana Puiggrós: “No vamos a aplicar reformas de golpe en toda la provincia. [Dialogue with Adriana Puiggrós: “We are not going to have shock therapy in the province.”] Página 12. Retrieved from www.pagina12.com.ar

4 Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses

INTRODUCTION Incentive programs aim to entice educators to behave in ways that will result in specific outcomes: to get teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools (Arrieta, 2010; Vegas, 2005), to teach toward standardized exams (Lavy, 2003), or just to show up for work (Parker, 2010). Such programs are an extension of a historical shaping of education policy by economic theories (McKayWilson, 2009), a worldwide phenomenon that views free market theories as a cure to economic and social ills (Lavy, 2003, p. 6). Evolved from principalagent theories (Prendergast, 1999), which propose that workers respond to rewards and are thus motivated to work in an employer’s interest (Ross, 1973), incentives are touted as a potential panacea for educational inequality and nearly every facet of life (Levitt & Dubner, 2005). While teachers may respond to monetary incentives, it is unclear “how the incentives work and under what conditions they create the types of changes desired” (Umansky, 2005, p. 21). In this chapter, I examine how incentives work. I look at how the teachers decided whether and how to take advantage of two different programs and what conditions shaped teachers’ decision-making. Specifically, I analyzed the 10 (five women, five men) Pampas teachers’ decisions regarding The Rural Program [La Ruralidad] in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, which provided bonuses ranging from 30% to 120% of the teacher’s monthly salary to work in hard-to-staff public schools. The program’s goal was to alleviate the unequal distribution of qualified educators. Similar to incentives around the world, the program aims to get teachers to work where they currently are not working, often in poor urban or rural communities at underfunded schools. I also analyze the six Jacaranda teachers’ decisions regarding Strong Schools [Escuela Fortaleza]. The Rural Program did not exist in Jacaranda’s urban setting within the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. However, teachers had the option to provide noninstructional counseling to students. If they applied and were chosen, they became a counselor [tutor] for approximately 30 students and their families in matters related to academic achievement,

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  71 such as the selection of courses, grades, and attendance. They also agreed to provide support in areas that indirectly affect academic achievement, including the loss of parents’ jobs, student or parental alcohol/drug abuse, and disciplinary issues (e.g., setting/respecting parent curfews). This program is similar to school counseling and mentoring programs, with the exception that the teachers were not trained in the fields of counseling or therapy and were not provided related professional development. Strong Schools reflects programs in developed nations that emphasize the benefits of strong adolescent-adult relationships to support academic success. I did not explore teachers’ views (e.g., opinions, perspectives, beliefs) of incentives; rather, the discussion here focuses on teachers’ decision-making. Did teachers want a bonus? How did teachers go about obtaining the Rural Program or Strong School bonus? What conditions enabled them to get the bonus? What conditions prevented teachers from obtaining it? What, if anything, did teachers do to compensate for their inability to access the bonus? How was gender involved in teachers’ “rational” economic decisionmaking? Teachers explained the premise of the incentives at times, which revealed deep understanding of policy logic undergirding such programs. However, the examination of incentives in the field or in the analysis of field data did not focus on teachers’ opinions of incentives overall. The data revealed that teachers’ decisions were mediated by gender— which begged further discussion of incentives policy logic. Incentives, after all, are about controlling workers; through rewards, employers aim to get workers to act in certain ways or perform certain tasks. In the case of neoliberal education reform via incentives, the expectation is that teachers can be controlled with a financial reward because of a presumably rational economic decision-making process. The policy logic is quite simplistic, static, and linear: Offer teachers money if they do A, B, or C. Teachers want more money and will do A, B, and C. But is the decision-making process so simple, linear, and/or static? What if the process is not so straightforward? What can be learned about the nature of control from the decision-making processes revealed? And, how might that insight contribute to understanding how neoliberalism is enacted and might be challenged? In this chapter, I argue that teachers’ ability to obtain the rewards offered through incentive programs was mediated through masculine and feminine practices, roles, and identities in a continuing process of negotiation with themselves, their immediate social relations, their evolving conceptualizations of teaching work, and the broader reform context. The mediation echoes two of Joan Acker’s five interactive processes that lead to gendered work, workers, and occupations (Acker, 1990). The third process is reflected in interactive patterns that enact dominance and submission within teaching. This plays out less in the daily decisions of teachers; rather incentives created patterns of access to financial rewards and career growth with implications for the composition of the profession and power structure over the long term. Also reflected in the teachers’ approaches to incentives is Acker’s

72  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses fourth interactive process whereby gendering produces gendered components of individual identity, mainly choice of work, clothing, and selfpresentation. These patterns of enacting masculinities and femininities were triggered by teachers’ decisions about incentives and are described below. Women and men indeed desired monetary rewards in the context of intensified global economic insecurity; however, teachers’ ability to access the reward varied by conditions such as safety, transportation, sense of school community, and familial responsibilities. Teachers make rational decisions, but sociocultural constraints and unequal positioning within the policy context mediate those decisions. Understanding the mediated policy process challenges the dominant policy logic behind incentives and suggests—from teachers’ street-level view—what kinds of incentives support teachers and teaching. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first two parts begin with a contextualization of the incentive programs within the Province and City. I have divided the first two parts further to focus on those who took up the incentives and those who did not. The final part of the chapter analyzes the ways gender mediated teachers’ enactment of incentives in order to critique the premise of incentive policies and reveal the nature of control underlying this facet of neoliberal reform of teachers’ work. I conclude with teachers’ suggestions for incentivizing their work and insight culled from teachers’ decision-making about what conditions matter when the concern is to support teachers’ work educating youth. INCENTIVES TO TEACH: THE RURAL PROGRAM Similar to other national contexts, Argentina suffers from an unequal distribution of qualified educators. Despite a shortage of work in the general labor market (12.7% unemployment and 10.1% underemployment in 2005 when the field work was completed), despite the flexibility of teaching work described above, and despite more men entering the classroom, qualified educators—men and women—still found some schools undesirable. The Rural Program attempted to alleviate the unequal distribution of qualified educators in the Province of Buenos Aires’s public schools with bonuses equivalent to a percentage of the teacher’s salary from 30%, 60%, 90%, 100%, to 120%. The percentage assigned by the government is based on unfavorable, inaccessible, prone-to-flooding, or a combination of these school conditions (Estatuto Docente de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 1957/2005). No definitions for the terms were provided. None of the women who participated in this study taught in 90% schools; the men did. None of the men taught in a 100% or 120% bonus school. All 10 Province teachers taught in at least one classified school: Pampas. To understand the unfavorable conditions behind a 60% category for Pampas consider that 71% of the population around Pampas lived below the poverty line (INDEC, 2003, 2007).

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  73 During the summer break between the 2004 and 2005 school years, all the windowpanes were stolen except in the faculty lounge, computer room, and main office, which have functioning locks on the doors. Winter came and the windows were not replaced; the community could not pay for them and the government did not fix them. Students and teachers were subjected to wind and rain; they began each class wiping mud and water off desks and chairs. The temperatures during morning classes were as low as 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The area did not have gas lines for heating. Staff bought electric heaters to share and lock up when not in use. None were used in classrooms. While the building had water, there was no public sewer line. Bathrooms regularly overflowed, if they worked at all. The concrete building was filthy and freezing (From Author’s Field Notes). In Pampas’s favor were four factors, which perhaps kept the school from qualifying at a higher percentage. First, it was located on a paved street within five blocks walking distance of a main highway. Second, Pampas sat between rural and urban landscapes in what sociologists call the second ring of metropolitan Buenos Aires. Although it qualified for the Rural Program, it was not so rural that public transportation was unavailable or irregular. Third, while the unpaved side streets became muddy puddles during rainstorms, the area did not flood. Last, Pampas was known among educators and educational researchers for its inclusive mission and strong community ties. The school offered marginalized youth and their families a space in which “primary relationships that are profoundly broken are sutured together” (Duschatzky, 1999, p.  82). The school was founded through grassroots organizing by elementary teachers, parents, and students who, prior to Pampas, had no accessible high school. As a result of this origin perhaps, Pampas continued to be considered a community organization, built and functioning to serve the needs of its neighbors.

More Money Although minimum base salary for teachers is set through negotiations between the national government and a national umbrella of teachers’ unions, provinces have the ability to pay teachers above that minimum to adjust for local economic contexts. The Province of Buenos Aires is the second wealthiest province, with the largest population (almost 14 million), and the second highest cost of living (INDEC, 2001). Base salary for teachers—no difference was noted between women and men’s salaries—was set at approximately $840 Argentine pesos/month for 30 hours maximum work a week (US$ 347/month), excluding one-time incentives offered by national and provincial governments, health benefits, and pension inputs. This was the third lowest base salary in the nation (Ministerio de Educación, 2007, p.14). These contextual factors inevitably shaped teachers’ decisions regarding incentives. All the men and women wanted to earn more money offered

74  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses through the Rural Program; however, as I show below, these decisions were mediated by gender.

SAFETY

Going Places Although men talked about more dangerous neighborhoods and the need for more discipline in Rural Program Schools, this did not dissuade them from pursuing teaching hours there. The men did not suggest that there were unsafe spaces of work for them, just more difficult assignments. For Lautaro Morales, working in new settlements [asentimientos nuevos], or shanty towns [villas], was difficult because of the school conditions, and also because the conditions in which students lived affected the student-toteacher relationship. Students in many Rural Schools, he said, “live with violence, addictions, broken families.” (Notably, he singled rural Pampas out as different, as a place where students seemed to receive more support and where teacher-student relationships were characterized by more “affection.”) Morales refused to take me to the other two Rural Program schools where he taught, which were 90% classified schools. He just said “no, I cannot take you there.” Morales practiced gender, or what Martin (2003) refers to as workers “socially constructing each other at work by means of a two-sided dynamic of gendering practices and practicing gender” (p. 343). In this case, he was socially constructing my femininity, class identity, and my Otherness in relation to the Rural Schools, and he could not and would not—even as a working-class man—assure me safe passage to them. Morales considered himself and other young men he taught with to be “going places” by obtaining hours at Rural Schools. He was a newer teacher with five years of experience, lower on the seniority scale, but he had obtained teaching hours at three incentive schools. He and a male friend explained that not only did Rural Program placements ensure a financial boost, but that logging more teaching hours would enable them to move up through the teacher seniority rank and on to other career goals: curriculum development or administration. The schools providing this financial and career boost were not considered unsafe or difficult to access; safety and access were not even an afterthought. For these two young, self-identified1 working-class men, the Rural Program placements were tickets to a stable, professional career and a middle-class income.

Personal Safety and Fitting In Three of five women voiced concern for their personal safety at work or on their way to and from work. One concern was the assumption that squatter

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  75 settlements or shantytown populations were prone to violence inside and outside of the classroom, echoing Morales’s comments above. None of the women had experienced violence in or around the schools where they taught. However, Monica Alvarez believed it was just a matter of time before violence erupted at Pampas. A female Spanish Language Arts teacher was robbed and assaulted as she left evening classes during the 2005 school year. For the time being, Alvarez firmly believed that, “God was watching over Pampas.” Student misconduct was common (e.g., talking back and not following directions) and commonly experienced by the three women concerned for their safety. Margarita Echeverria discusses behavior in relation to her ability to teach: many teachers want . . . discipline. . . . I can’t teach when I am preoccupied with behavior problems. I want to teach content, not be silenced in the middle of my class. Yes, I want to teach content and I can’t. Monica Alvarez spoke of the problem of misconduct too. She described it in terms of authority. “It is ok that students do not read, they have many problems,” she suggested, “as long as they are not insulting you, something that I have felt in schools, that they insult the teachers with all the insults that you can imagine.” When students stop viewing schools and teachers as authority, problems arise for the women. None of the men stated that they had discipline problems. Four of the five men stated that they were aware that their female colleagues did have problems with discipline. Isabel Gomez used a map to avoid schools with a “reputation for having behavior problems.” Despite hours being available, she “took a job at another school, figured that based on where it was physically located that the kids were coming from good families.” When asked, “What do you mean by good families?” Gomez responded that the kids “behave well. The children are well-behaved.” The other two Pampas teachers, Monica Alvarez and Margarita Echeverria, employed similar strategies of consulting maps and teaching friends, but they did not mention a concern for the families served by the school. While both struggled with student conduct, they attributed the problem more to the group dynamics of adolescents when in schools. Search strategies employed by Alvarez, Echeverria, and Gomez limited these women’s ability to get a reward. Their inability to participate in certain aspects of the incentive program was intimately connected to their concerns for safety, and their desire to teach without challenges or disciplinary problems in schools. Their search for safe schools was also extended to include safe communities, and was coupled by a concern for personal safety, for protecting their feminine bodies and for not crossing a gendered geographic line even for work and incentives. Limiting the space through which they moved in the labor market limited the women’s work hours and any linked incentive reward.

76  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses Travel to schools was one example of this type of safety concern. On our first trip to Pampas together, Alvarez warned that we must cross a highwaythat was very dangerous. She felt she took her life into her hands each time she crossed it. There are no rules, no respect for the pedestrian, and even if there was a light, that does not mean that traffic will stop for it, plus there are vehicles that are turning onto the highway and may not see a pedestrian crossing. After successfully running across the highway, she turned to me, “Every time I come out here, it’s the same crossing.” Alvarez feared for her safety in relation to transportation infrastructure, or the lack thereof. As will be discussed below, most men in this study, but not most women, drove cars, and thus would not have faced this dangerous crossing. The women also anticipated physical violence and adapted strategies to avoid it. Women would walk together, clutching purses tightly to their bodies and walking down the middle of side streets. When asked why they walked down the middle of the road (I was fearful of getting hit by a car), Monica Alvarez, Margarita Echeverria, and Isabel Gomez laughed because they did not know exactly why they chose to walk in the middle of the street. They told me that they just did. Within such practices lies the potential for consciousness-raising and the development of collegiality. However, this shared experience of having to walk in groups for fear of personal safety is an inconvenience. Whereas the men might finish classes and return home immediately, the women teachers had to either wait for a ride or for others to walk with them before heading to the highway to wait for their next bus. The teachers did not finish teaching at the same time. They were contracted to teach specific hours, not to teach in a specific school as teachers are accustomed to in Western and Northern school systems. Teachers’ work is so fragmented across high schools that community or collegiality is challenging and challenged. Walking in groups and/or using pedestrian and automobile infrastructures in unconventional ways is an inconvenient survival strategy for maintaining employment at schools where bonuses can be earned. The female teachers perceived some geographic spaces as off-limits and unsafe to them, including bus stations, stops, and routes, as well as neighborhoods and school sites. Whether restrictions were imposed by others or by oneself, they reiterated historically derived notions of gender-divided social and cultural spaces. Throughout modern capitalist history, women have had their movement restricted in relation to sociocultural ideas of what is feminine, appropriate, and safe. When such restrictions are challenged— as they so often have been—women have been punished. Girls are taught at an early age not to walk alone at night for fear of being attacked. The blame, if a girl does get attacked, lies not on the human rights violation, the

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  77 act of violating another, but rather on the girl for the infraction of moving through physical space in a particular temporal moment. The policing of girls’/women’s bodies does not stop with space and time but continues with appearance. From girls’/women’s headscarves in public schools in France to women teachers’ shaving practices in the United States (Koza, 2003), policing of women’s bodies is widespread in educational settings. Dressing to blend into a rural school and remain safe was a lesson learned by Monica Alvarez. She discussed her first weeks of teaching at Pampas: When I started I went more made up, with high heels . . . until one day I realized that . . . I was told by an older member of the school staff, and, poor thing, she did not know how to tell me . . . that day it had rained hard, and the street was a river and me with my heels . . . “Monica, you see how it is outside in the street, in the neighborhood.” . . . She did not know how to tell me!” Look, it’s not a good idea to wear heels, you could fall, it’s all mud. There is no sidewalk.” I understood what she could not tell me: one needs to come dressed more simply, less out of place . . . look at the people dressed simply, really, don’t get dressed up much. Also, she told me for another reason, another question too: There are certain clothes, students just cannot have. There are kids who will tell you, nice jacket, teacher. Still others are capable of saying,” Ah! Look at this one with those clothes, who does she think she is.” I was told to avoid those situations, because they could rob me. Alvarez was wearing clothes she wore regularly in the City of Buenos Aires during her teacher education program. She began to wear jeans, sneakers, and less formal blouses to teach, so as to conform her body and appearance to that of the rural school surroundings. This policing came from her female colleagues and was internalized. Alvarez was not presented with nor did she negotiate an alternative performance of a young woman teacher in the Province. While she was presented with a seemingly alternative version of woman than she knew it was limited to appearance, her gendered performance was not to change (Butler, 1990) just her clothing, for her own safety. This policing and conformity of Alvarez’s body to her work environment stands in contrast to Morales’s comments downplaying Pampas as an unsafe school with unsafe students. Although Morales was performing a feminine job, his masculinity still is deemed acceptable—even perhaps more resilient and capable for the work in Pampas and other Rural Program schools. And none of the men mentioned their clothes as needing to conform to the feminine job. Alvarez was also uncomfortable during her five-block walk because it was an unfamiliar space, because she had to walk in the dark sometimes, and because she had to cross a dangerous highway on foot. These were attributes she could not change, but she decided she could change her

78  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses appearance. These gendered regulations were present for women teachers when contemplating Rural Program incentives. Because they were mindful of personal safety while commuting to classes and while at school, they conducted research prior to signing up for Rural Program teaching hours and continued to do that research while working within the communities and when seeking more teaching hours. Again, Butler’s critique of the limitations of gender constructs was helpful and indeed helped tease out the complexity of masculinities and femininities. The women’s research involved negotiating femininity; it was reflective of their search for environments in which they could perform the socially accepted role of teacher, while traveling to them involved passing through spaces that were not necessarily deemed safe for feminine subjects. The men’s experience, by contrast, drew on constructs of masculinity that naturalized their presence, however they might be dressed. Men (strangely) belonged, as is. The incentive rewards available to women were contingent on women’s abilities to negotiate the tensions surrounding teachers’ femininity and it particularly rewarded men, whose experiences with the incentive, mediated by masculinity, involved far fewer tensions. TRANSPORTATION Transportation factored into one man’s and four women’s decisions whether to accept Rural Program placements. Four of the five men owned and drove a car. Only Lautaro Morales walked or took buses. If the cost of transportation and time to travel was not excessive in relation to the number of hours offered at incentive schools, he accepted the work. He had to walk eight blocks on a dirt road to reach one of them, for example. Because of car ownership, men commuted less time than women did. Three of the five men commuted less than five hours a week. Only one woman commuted less than five hours a week. Isabel Gomez only had one hour commute each week by bus to get to the two schools where she worked. She also had the least number of work hours. Why did women not own cars or have driver’s licenses? Monica Alvarez and Ana Laura Cabezas reported that they did not have the money to purchase and maintain a car. Cabezas in particular discussed living on a very tight budget in which three of the four family members contributed to make ends meet. The fourth, her husband, was retired and brought in a small pension. She just did not have the money. Monica Alvarez confided that she and her girlfriends dared each other to go to driving school to get driver’s licenses. They passed driving school, but never paid the fees to get the official licenses. “Why would I waste the money? I cannot afford a car and expenses!” Driving and owning a car was a masculine activity among the educators in this study. Compared with the four men in this study who owned

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  79 cars, only one woman had a car. Gender is a salient social category shaping teachers’ transportation options. Unfortunately, the Automobile Club of Argentina does not disaggregate driver data by gender to understand this condition further. Gomez was also concerned about spending too much money and time commuting to safe schools. She only accepted teaching assignments requiring less than two bus rides from house to school. I had the opportunity to work in another school but after noting that I had to take two buses to get there, I gave up the position. It was difficult to travel between jobs. And the cost of travelling made it not worth the effort. All four car-less women investigated whether the school was on a major road where buses could drop them off in front of the school. Alternatively, they looked for short walks to and from the school. In the wintertime when daylight hours were shorter, concerns over transportation and personal safety overlapped. Morning sessions began at dawn and afternoon classes ended at dusk. (None of the women accepted evening teaching hours at Pampas.) Walking with others was a common practice. Rather than perceive themselves as victims, the women understood their situation to be an inconvenient necessity. Having to find a ride to the highway with teachers or others to walk with was an inconvenience, but it was a survival strategy that the women accepted and navigated to continue to earn a living and develop a career. COMMUNITY A sense of community was the last condition found to mediate teachers’ decisions to work in Rural Program classified schools. Women and men used their knowledge to get placements in schools with a reputation for facultycommunity relationships or supportive, mentoring faculty and administrators. They learned through previous teaching assignments that in many of the higher reward rural schools, they would teach less and discipline more. They wanted the financial reward, but they also wanted the professional satisfaction and growth that comes with working in a supportive, caring, school community. They wanted to teach. Five of the teachers even arranged to co-teach and lead students through a historiography course even though the school could not pay for all of their work hours. Echeverria explained: In reality [the directors] gave me the [paid] hours but I  have a very friendly relationship with Lautaro Morales. For one we are very compatible in how we think history should be. So he and I  support each other. . . . [W]e are friends and we collaborate.

80  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses When community was a strong attribute of schools, men and women decided to work there and, in this case, a financial reward was not a concern.

Breadwinning There was another definition of community that potentially shaped men’s drive to go after the incentive rewards. Esteban Polanco described how the pressure to provide for his family pushed him to seek work hours and enabled him to overcome the potential impediment of being a man in a woman’s job: There is a strong work component. I think that my case is representative of many teachers in the province . . . . [Y]ou have to talk about the whole process of the state receding, of the [privatization] of public services. In this framework is an increase in unemployment that continues. My wife was a teacher or just about to become an elementary teacher and that was in my favor in comparison with many of my contemporaries, at least my wife worked. [But] I had to find an alternative job in a very difficult moment when doors closed and did not open. Polanco confessed to his teaching colleagues in a group interview that he went into teaching to earn an income and benefits for his family: teaching was a job, not a calling. While becoming a teacher could be perceived as a barrier for the men in this study, the need to be a breadwinner pushed them to seek teaching hours and climb the seniority scale. Women, of course, were also concerned with earning salaries and benefits to support their families. Ana Laura Cabezas spoke of her tight budget. Two of the five women at Pampas were primary breadwinners, two more were significant contributors to their families’ financial well-being, and the last was not concerned with income brought in. (At Jacaranda four of the six women were the primary breadwinners in their family. Two noted that their husbands’ income was the primary salary for the family.) Yet none of the women framed their drive for work hours solely in terms of income generation. Rather, their search for work was overshadowed by the need to assess where that work would be done and with whom.

Desirable for More Than Money Pampas was a desirable teaching placement because of a reputation for community. The school was dedicated to working-class and working-poor students and their families. Teachers and administrators had a common goal beyond earning a paycheck and teaching their subject matter: to include students and their families in the school, to open the doors, to offer a chair, and to listen to what was needed to support students’ secondary education. As Enrique Morino explains:

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  81 Reform, order, norms are good, but only one of the pillars [of education]. I think the other also is intra-school work, here [in Pampas], I  think, that you need to consider  .  .  .  consensus, that mandates do not reach. The image of [Pampas] was the horizontal school, the open school. The teachers often quoted or referred to Paulo Freire and fashioned their work in terms of conscientization (Freire, 2000). Lautaro Morales’s description of his work at Pampas reflected this concept. He described the purpose of his work as helping students recognize that: they are . . . active subjects and creators of their own history. If they do not know where they come from, it’s like awakening . . . without memory. You have to know who you are, and where you are going, why you are in the place you are. . . . [H]istory helps you with this, helps you realize you are an active social subject and how to act . . . be a part of humanity. Men in this study reported seeking teaching hours at Pampas for the focus on serving the working poor and impoverished community. This sense of serving was attributed to a director who united faculty members across three school sessions at Pampas (morning, afternoon, and evening). The director also worked to develop a school community that included faculty and the neighborhood. The teachers often contrasted the community offered at Pampas with the broader expulsive educational system and society. Membrives, Morales, and Polanco referred to Pampas as “the last frontier” for students. Beyond Pampas was the abyss, and the school needed to teach curricular knowledge and how to cope with limited opportunities. “How far does the state go to help students? The state does not exist anymore,” lamented Morales. In contrast, Esteban Polanco described the school as: attentive to social change, [a] pioneer in realizing that societies were changing, that the world was changing, and that it would generate, in metropolitan Buenos Aires, an important mass of unemployed people and that this would have grave social consequences. The school would be the last bastion of what remained of the state. The men were concerned about the lack of support offered to communities and took on the work at Pampas to address it.

Women Teachers as Community Activists Women were also eager to work at Pampas. Ana Laura Cabezas and Alejandra Espina were especially eager to work in collaborative, supportive schools.

82  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses They entered and stayed in the profession out of a sense of activism. In spite of the fear conveyed by Cabezas’s colleague about the possibility of theft, the teachers generally did not speak about Pampas in a way that suggested that they viewed it as dangerous; rather, they viewed Pampas as underserved and the students and their families as victims of social and economic inequality and injustice. Cabezas noted that the students she worked with at Pampas were “kids too” and deserved a (public) education. They saw a chance to build community and hoped that as a bonus, they could collaborate with like-minded educators. The women who embraced and practiced the activist teacher challenged the simple and simplistic dominant images of educators as caregivers, nurturers, or “second mothers” (Fischman, 2000). Rather, their work at Pampas expanded on teacher conceptualizations prevalent in Argentine society and other national contexts as well. This activist teacher contrasts somewhat with the men’s views of working for the community. Men articulated their activism in terms of fulfilling the duties or the role of caretaker left unfulfilled by the retracting welfare state. So, while they talked of advocating on behalf of the school community, their talk stemmed not from broader inequality, but rather in terms of filling the abyss created by the dismantled state. The gendered nature of state and nation making (Dore & Molyneaux, 2000; Yuval-Davis, 1997) and of the gendering process of state policies and programs (O’Connor, Orloff, & Shaver, 1999) is not lost on the men. They read the failures of the state to care for the Pampas community to be a failure of the head of the imagined household and they set out to pick up the responsibilities. Pampas’s work offered all teachers a 60% reward through the incentive program. The incentive, however, was not only the money: it was also the possibility of working for the school community. Men and women teachers desired a sense of community at their workplace, the opportunity of working for a community, and of fulfilling community expectations of taking care of a family. The incentive program reinforces gendered roles in a family, whether a nuclear unit or the extended family that includes community networks. The teachers take on gendering roles with men assuming traditional “head of the family” roles, and the women working as caregivers, in the more “domestic” role of nurturing, versus administering. BONUSES FOR NOT TEACHING: STRONG SCHOOLS Although merit pay programs are the most well known incentives, there are many forms aimed at incentivizing teachers. The Strong Schools Program [Programa Fortaleza Escolar] is another example. Initiated in 1989, it required high school teachers to provide weekly, mandatory one-on-one counseling to first- and second-year students and their families. The objective was to create stronger links between schools and homes in the educational process. Families were directed to whatever state services still existed

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  83 to cover the cost of school supplies, drug/alcohol addiction, and general psychological counseling. Families were also offered the reassurance that teachers were watching over students, ensuring homework was done and attendance did not drop. Strong Schools also enabled educators to augment work hours within Jacaranda rather than traveling to additional schools or taking on additional jobs to supplement their income. The teachers who participated in the program received two additional paid hours a week.

More Money The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires is Argentina’s wealthiest subnational entity with a population of almost three million and the highest population density (INDEC, 2001). At the time this research was conducted, 10% of the City’s population lived below the poverty line according to national census statistics (INDEC, 2007). This is the third lowest urban poverty level in the nation. The City is the seat of the national government and financial power. Jacaranda is situated one block from a major avenue, four blocks from a commuter train station, and seven blocks from a subway line. All roads were paved or cobblestone. Public and private services such as trash collection, telephone, cable, electricity, gas, and sewage were standard, not exceptions. The school is part of an infrastructure typical of a so-called “developed,” “modern,” or global city (Ciccolella & Mignaqui, 2002). Base salary for City teachers with 10 years of teaching experience was $893 Argentine pesos a month. It was the highest base salary in the nation and, as the teachers pointed out: it was always paid in full, in cash, and on time, although lower than previous years and without full payment into health care and pensions. When adjusted for inflation, Argentina’s highest teacher salaries reflected sums teachers had earned in the 1980s (Dirié & Oiberman, 1999). The Jacaranda teachers who participated in this study worked an average of 40 hours a week to compensate. Gains in base salary made a limited impact on their salary and their pension contributions. Still, teachers had lost salary, particularly teachers who had been teaching for 20 or more years, and no amount of saving would make up for lost contributions to pensions and savings accounts. Despite this salary context, two of the six teachers in the study did not apply to the Strong Schools Program. Time constraints at the intersection of complex public work and private lives conditioned decisions.

Incentive to Stay in Place Jacaranda is located, according to national statistics, in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the City (INDEC, 2001, 2007). None of the Jacaranda teachers were concerned for safety traveling to and from Jacaranda or while at school. Parents and students interviewed described the neighborhood as safe. Although several first-year students were mugged each year on their

84  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses way to school—pick-pocketed on buses or while walking to school, or asked for their watches, for example—these incidents were attributed to the students’ physical size and lack of street smarts. No teachers (or older students) reported such incidents. TRANSPORTATION Jacaranda faculty lived closer to their jobs. It is unclear why this is the case. Both areas are densely populated. One plausible explanation is that the teachers had been teaching at Jacaranda for decades. Over the years, with stable employment secured, perhaps they moved close to their workplace. The school was easy to access via multiple modes of public transportation depending on where teachers lived. Teachers took one bus at most or walked the short distance. Also available was a commuter passenger train and a subway, as well as taxis. Only one teacher drove and owned a car although she did not drive regularly. (This reflects the number of Pampas’s women teachers who drove and owned a car). With the exception of one teacher, Agostini, the Jacaranda teachers only worked at Jacaranda; they did not “taxi” between multiple schools (see Chapter Two). The conditions of safety and transportation did not shape decisions whether to apply for Strong Schools. The program was offered at the one school they all worked at already, allowing all six teachers to earn two hours’ extra pay, working two hours minimum of extra work. Strong Schools incentivized teachers to stay put, to spend more time in Jacaranda. Strong Schools tapped into a readily available and eager worker pool. Teachers were already at the school, already knew the students and some of the families, and already knew each other, easing communication and collaboration to support students. Teachers wanted more salary without traveling, expending time, energy, and money to earn more. They were happy with their commute to and work at Jacaranda. Why not apply for a Strong Schools’ tutoring position? Jacaranda teachers arrived safely and happily to their jobs. When asked the survey question, “How do you arrive at school?” a geography professor responded, “As happy as can be!”2 Although the question was meant to elicit information about commuting, this succinctly (and happily) delivered response summed up Jacaranda teachers’ desire to arrive and remain at work. Furthermore, in contrast with Pampas’s teachers, safety and transportation conditioned their decisions to go after the Strong School’s bonus although in a positive light rather than a negative and prohibitive one. PART OF THE COMMUNITY Jacaranda teachers felt comfortable in the surrounding neighborhood and within the school. Teaching at Jacaranda was a sort of membership into a

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  85 family of educators. They were professionals hired to teach, to collaborate with colleagues, and to dedicate themselves to Jacaranda. Strong Schools ensured that they did so a few more hours a week.

RESISTING THE IRRESISTIBLE

Work-life Conflict In Argentina, school days vary in length. Most public schools have two sessions: a morning and an afternoon shift. This means teachers—and their students—enter at 7:30 and leave by 12:15 for the morning shift so that the next group of teachers and students can enter at 1:00 and finish at 5:50 p.m. for the afternoon shift. There is an evening shift available at some schools. Jacaranda did not have one, but Pampas did. Some public schools have full days [doble turno] or require the morning and afternoon shift of teachers and students. María Romina Astudillo’s child attended a public school in the morning. She taught only in the mornings then rushed off to collect him. Her so-called flexible work hours enabled her to work and to take care of her child. Yet gendered dynamics mediated teachers’ decisions to accept the incentive. Four of the six history teachers tutored. Astudillo did not, because she did not have time. She had a young child. Of the six teachers who participated, three were mothers. Of the three mothers, only Astudillo had an elementary-aged child. Her children’s short school day limited the length of her paid workday. Astudillo’s teaching work did not conflict with her familial responsibilities per se, but it did set clear boundaries for avoiding it. She desired extra income, but stated that she had a small child to care for, no matter the income earned, period. Her committed, no-nonsense manner of speaking about her son sat uneasily with notions of work-life conflict; there was no conflict. Yet she had the least amount of teaching hours of all Jacaranda educators and the lowest pay. Conflict or not, the bonus was beyond Astudillo’s reach despite the convenience the Strong Schools afforded teachers of earning extra income at their school and without any extra expense of travel. No incentive could entice her to place work and family in conflict. Incentive policies, again, do not function on the ground, unlimited by societal concerns. In this case, the limitation is the most base: the gendered division of labor in the household.

No Time for a Bonus Sofia Corti also did not apply for a tutor position. She had several reasons. First, she did not have time. “Administrative positions consume so much time and at times take time away from thinking and writing. It’s a fault of the position.” Also, the bonus was not substantial enough to warrant taking on

86  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses the extra work of finding time. As headmaster, Corti had a higher salary than teachers. She also earned additional income as an instructor at a research institute. While she taught a history course at Jacaranda, she did not earn extra income doing so. Money was not the primary motivation for doing her work. “Educators have to stay more time in the day than they are necessarily paid for because they are presented with a situation and they just cannot go, they have to resolve or try to see how to do it.” The Strong Schools bonus offered no enticing incentive to her. Interestingly, her position at the top of the hierarchical educational labor market as an administrator and as an over-educated classroom teacher priced her out of the incentive. She performed managerial work, and she taught more prestigious knowledge at the university. Situated in what are often perceived as masculinized domains in education work, she had no need for the Strong Schools care work. DESIRED FOR DIFFERENT REASONS: IRRESISTIBLE CONFLICT Corti was enticed by the Strong Schools Program in a different way. She noted an increase in the care work teachers and administrators had to provide students and even their parents as the economic conditions in the nation declined. She knew the extra pay for out of class tutoring would allow teachers to shift focus to teaching content in the classroom, compartmentalize the care work under the rubric of tutoring for the program. As an administrator concerned for the quality of education offered, Strong Schools was an incentive she could not refuse and one she hoped the teacher-tutors would not refuse either. The choice to bring Strong Schools to Jacaranda was not without conflict. First, there were not enough hours to distribute to all teachers who wished to earn extra pay. At the first faculty meeting of the year, Graciela García, the school’s pedagogical advisor and administrator of the program, strained to be heard above teachers’ angry complaints that there were not enough tutoring hours to go around. The tutor selection, she attempted to explain, would be based on the directors’ decisions of which tutor could best support the students. The teachers voiced their complaint that the decisions were based on favoritism rather than any legitimate criteria. When I  spoke with García after the tense meeting, she reiterated that choosing between teachers was difficult. She added that the selection process also conflicted with the school culture of working collaboratively. This was not the first, nor the last mention of a strong school community thriving at Jacaranda. I  was initially directed to Jacaranda as a potential research site by educational researchers and history teachers because the school faculty worked positively, proactively, and cohesively despite intense pressures on and conflict within the broader labor market and public school system. The incentive inserted an element of competition for paid work within this heralded, idealized setting. Garcia and Corti loathed it just as the teachers grumbling at the meeting did.

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  87 The nature of the competition cited by Jacaranda administrators conflicts with more general, global framings of incentives as good, or at worst as a necessary evil to improve education. Yet Jacaranda’s Strong Schools Program clearly weakened a strong school culture. This has gendered symbolic roots. The Jacaranda teachers and administrators who participated in the study discussed their workplace as woman-centered, a place where feminine (albeit essentialized) qualities dominated. Teachers supported each other in fulfilling a shared mission to nurture their charges’ development as an educated people and citizens. They did not see themselves as caregivers, but as purveyors of knowledge. Teachers, administrators, and parents worked together to provide what many national educational experts considered the best, criteria-free public education possible. A strong school had existed for decades. Competition for the extra hours undermined and denigrated that culture, inserting market, masculinized qualities into their hyper-localized educational labor market. Nevertheless, the directors believed the program to be worthwhile to implement. Students needed an increased amount of academic (and nonacademic) counseling. Garcia noted that the demand for counseling intensified teachers’ paid work even before the 2001 economic crisis. Corti elaborated on Garcia’s observation explaining, “The crisis was just the culmination of the process by which high school teachers’ work began to involve handling many more social problems: violence, hunger, no money, unemployed parents, drug, and alcohol addiction” (Interview, July 16, 2006). Teachers claimed that parents’ demands on them took on a different character in the years leading up to and after the crisis. Instead of participating in the parent organization and meeting with school officials over academic issues, parents began to turn to teachers (and the school, more generally) for social and psychological aid. Teachers, administrators, and parents echoed this sentiment in separate interviews. The incentive did what it was supposed to: enticed educators to do work for the employer. The incentive, however, came at an undetermined cost: competition over conflicting professional identities and over desired bonuses. (Strong Schools also continued the transformation of teachers into caregivers, a point I discuss in Chapter 5.) DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS: CRITIQUING RATIONAL ECONOMIC DECISION MAKING AND DESIRE Teachers’ gendered identities, sociocultural roles, and relations had an impact on access to incentives and decisions to obtain them. This is evident from the teachers’ stories about whether or not they worked in Rural Program schools and the Strong Schools Program. I discuss the findings here in relation to the rational economic decision-making and inherent desire for financial bonuses that incentives are premised on, and on which teachers

88  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses were expected to act. I have divided the discussion along the false dichotomy that is the premise of incentives. The aim is less to reify a two-bin gendered world and more to explode the bins from within. Men and women all desired more money. Furthermore, men and women all acted in rational ways as they made decisions over and over again about whether to go after an incentive and if not, how to rationally pursue in short- and long-term fashion their desire for increased income.

Men’s Access: A Cost-Benefit Analysis by the Rational, Instrumental Subject? With few exceptions, men were able to apply a straightforward, constraintfree cost-benefit analysis to assess whether to accept teaching hours at Rural Program schools. They wanted extra pay and therefore took hours at Rural School Programs. The incentive provided an immediate benefit and with only one exception—Lautaro Morales’s lack of a car—the men made the decision without safety, transportation, or community being a hindrance. The incentive pay program motivated men to seek rewards, and men, unlike women, had few impediments to achieving them. Perhaps the men in this study were circumspect for reasons of masculinity. Perhaps they did face more impediments to work, including safety concerns. Or the men’s experiences may have influenced the way that they perceived violence: having lived through a brutal military dictatorship, which many discussed in oppressive terms. They may not have perceived the potential for violence when traveling to Rural Program schools as matching that earlier state-sponsored violence. Or perhaps, as Morales pointed out, the students at Rural Schools were not violent—they were just poor, and the men read the communities as such, travelling for the most part in their cars, and taking advantage of incentives where possible. Masculinities mediated the decision-making process surrounding the incentive pay program. However, that mediation did not inhibit or present obstacles to taking advantage of bonus pay and garnering as many hours as possible. This study illustrates how gendered roles, relations, identities, and structures play a part in the decision-making process, namely by not inhibiting access or, in the case of community expectations of the male breadwinner, translating to a push toward work. If the men want the reward (as the logic of incentives suggests) then they will seek it. Doing so offered them not only more money, but also the promise of longer-term career growth, or as Morales described it, of “going places.” While the data above focused on the history teachers (all of whom were women at Jacaranda), the experiences of men who taught in other subjects at the school offers insight into the sense of community Jacaranda afforded teachers. A biology and physical education teacher were interviewed. Both men had been at the school for a shorter period of time and noted that men were in the minority, attributing that to the strong feminine culture of the

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  89 school. Nevertheless, they felt welcomed and loved teaching at Jacaranda. They did not seek the Strong Schools incentive though. They cited the work: they were not interested in providing the care the extra pay implied and they saw their feminine colleagues as better situated to do so for two reasons. First, they both traveled by car from a distance to Jacaranda. They did not want to change their commuting arrangements. Second, both had fewer hours at Jacaranda. They did not work full time there and the bonus was not enticing enough for the effort entailed. Again, the Jacaranda men acted in rational economic ways when making their decisions: Strong Schools was not worth the time and effort. WOMEN’S ACCESS: COMPROMISED COST-BENEFIT ANALYSES OF A RATIONAL INSTRUMENTAL SUBJECT? Women’s cost-benefit analysis approach to incentives took into account personal safety and transportation for Rural Program schools and Strong Schools. Women researched safe and accessible schools and took what hours they could from the Rural Program. When they could not take on the hours, they made compromises in the short term to obtain more paid work at the schools where they had hours. Jacaranda teachers, on the other hand, were offered a bonus to remain at the school they felt safe traveling to and remaining within. Compromise or not, the women acted in rational economic ways when making decisions about incentives. The decision-making process just happened to involve a concern for safety, transportation, and family responsibilities. Efforts to make up for and take advantage of the limitations safety and transportation placed on them are strikingly rational decisions that, in the end, pointed toward a concerted effort to earn more income from their teaching. Monica Alvarez took on one extra paid hour a week at Pampas coordinating the social sciences faculty and curriculum. Her choice reflected the Strong Schools Program’s offer of staying in place, performing additional nonteaching work for extra pay where she was able to travel to and remain safely. While Alvarez and Strong Schools recipients all saved by not having to travel to another school, they all confessed that to fulfill the responsibilities, they worked more hours than they were paid. The number of hours they had to put in increased each year too. In the 2005 school year, due to new educational reform mandates for accountability, Alvarez worked seven more hours a month than she was paid to meet the demands to submit lesson plans and other administrative records to provincial authorities. The four Strong Schools tutors also reported working more hours to fulfill responsibilities. The impetus for their extra work hours was deteriorating socioeconomic conditions of their students’ families, which had not subsided in the four years since the December 2001 crisis.

90  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses Alejandra Espina also worked as an assistant principal at one of the schools where she taught. She sensed that 2005 was the last year she would hold the position, however, and would therefore lose the extra pay. The Province had announced that it would formalize the position, requiring her to re-apply for the job she had held for over five years. She was unsure she had the required credentials and was also unsure about participating in a formal oral and public competition against other applicants. She contemplated returning for a master’s in history to enhance her teaching and earnings instead. Returning to school was a compromise that women made when faced with fewer-than-desired teaching hours. Isabel Gomez returned to school in 2005 to obtain certification in geography. She hoped that two certifications would increase her chances of securing more hours of safe and accessible work. She diverted her energy away from securing more hours for more pay in history classrooms, taking the chance that in the long term, she would secure more work via both subject areas. Echeverria utilized this strategy too, beginning a university-level history degree. Six of the 16 educators in this study held university degrees. Echeverria, like the majority of Argentina’s secondary educators, earned teaching credentials through a nonuniversity teacher education institute, or normal school. Echeverria justified her choice to study as a way to strengthen her pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) and as a way of improving her seniority and access to hours. A university degree gave educators more seniority points, raising the teacher’s ranking. In the short term she would pay for her studies (fees, materials, transportation, and time unavailable to teach) so that in the long term her studies might provide her a return of improved professional skills and knowledge, a boost up the seniority ladder, and access to more work. Gomez and Echeverria devised compromises involving unpaid work in the short term with the hope that it would lead to more paid work in the long term. All the teachers made decisions about incentives that involved short-term and long-term strategies. Pampas teachers’ plans for more education would lead to a combination of improved teaching (Espina); broader access to teaching hours (Gomez); and more seniority points (Echeverria). Jacaranda teachers’ plans would provide for immediate pay increase and whatever money could be saved would support underfunded pensions. All the women desired professional and financial incentives. Their paths toward those desires varied and were differently constrained by their location in the sociocultural and economic landscape. The paths, revealed in this chapter, offer insight on the varied meanings and forms that incentives take on as teachers navigate them in context. When reform analyses are isolated from the lives lived in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts, where decisions are made, remade, and remade again as time marches on, teachers’ policy enactment goes unseen and unheard. So too is the insight that teachers’ policy enactment offers. The findings regarding the importance of community, a vital incentive for all the teachers, is overlooked.

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  91 Only one of the men was studying during the time this research was conducted. Enrique Morino began a master’s in history program. However, he did not equate his studies to his secondary school teaching or even to more work (he had the most teaching hours, 58 hours/week, out of all participants). Instead, he aimed to move up the academic teaching hierarchy with his master’s degree; he had his sights on getting out of high school classrooms and into higher education. He desired the Rural Program incentive differently and in the process offered yet another meaning and form to incentive programs. CONCLUSIONS This chapter examined teachers’ decisions about incentives. Four conditions mediated teachers’ decisions to (or not to) go after bonus salary: safety, transportation, community, and professional/familial responsibilities. Delving into the conditions revealed how masculinities and femininities are embedded in the concept of the worker, the work performed or expected of the worker, and the ways that the gendered nature of policy decisions transforms workers and their workplaces. Women and men approached incentives differently as in the case of teachers interested in the Rural Schools’ bonuses. However, Strong School recipients’ approach reflected that of the Rural School men: safety and transportation were non-issues. Gender—in context—mediated decisions to take up a reward. When women and men had differential access to the work space where the incentive was rewarded, their negotiations of incentives diverged along a two-bin gender system. Yet, within those bins—as Polanco and Astudillo reminded us—individual women and men were constrained and pushed by social and contextual issues that shaped their approaches to the incentives. These issues related to broader structures that shape the spaces through which men and women move and what gendered practices men and women espouse within those work spaces and within their families. Whether an incentive can supersede structural constraints experienced by teachers is unclear. The incentive programs invoked qualities more often associated with hegemonic femininities and masculinities. In the case of Rural Schools, hegemonic masculine qualities of bravery and strength, connected gendered bodies and identities to monetary rewards. The connection was not lost on men who moved into the feminine and feminized space of the school and profession. The Rural Program buttressed men’s hegemonic masculinity, an ability to move freely through social space, and rewarded them as the male breadwinner. The Rural School program affects what Joan Acker referred to as the third interactive process of gendering of occupations, whereby men begin to enact dominance in the educational labor market impacted by the program, with the implications for control of teachers’ work potentially reverberating in the future.

92  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses In the case of the Strong Schools, hegemonic femininities of caregiver, nurturer, naturally inclined and knowledgeable of how to take care of familial concerns even in a public domain trumped. The women were rewarded in their workplace for fulfilling familial responsibilities, although not for their own families. Interestingly, Strong Schools supported the historical dominance of women in the teaching workforce, which remained within Jacaranda. While men had made inroads into teaching even at Jacaranda, women prevailed and the women-dominated administration and school culture ensured that selected tutors would continue this tradition. Opposite of the Rural Schools’ effect on gendering teaching, the Strong School program bolstered the gendering of teaching as feminine and feminized work. Divorced from a sense of process and from context, analyses of incentives overlook these important interpretations. Last, neoliberalism has a history and it is fluid. Incentives, at least as in the case of the Rural Program, are not new but rather were implemented, tested, and perhaps receded from the limelight. Teachers discussed the Rural Program as a recent policy. Yet archival research revealed documents with the policy language dating back to 1957 (Provincia de Buenos Aires, 1957/2005). While the policy was reissued and reauthorized in 2005— hence the teachers’ sense that it was new—as part of the second-wave of neoliberal reform, the earlier date is important as it supports two implications of the current study. It illustrates that policy is an ongoing, not a static process. Neoliberal policy logics are not new, but rather evolved over time to current and more widespread manifestations. The differing dates also suggest incentives need to be historicized, an analytic endeavor that may yield much-needed insight into how such policies work or fail to work and under what conditions. By historicizing the success or failure of such plans to achieve goals, research like the current study would also shed further light on the assertion that incentive policies are mediated by persons in a nonlinear fashion at various levels of the policy process whether the focus is on teachers’ decision making or a government policy maker. Alternatively, the incentive component of the policy may have been added on to the older, comprehensive teacher policy in 2005. Incentives continue to evolve, becoming entrenched in the 21st century educational arena, and need to be studied in the present, but linked to their past. Why is the time ripe for certain policies’ revival? What makes the context and the women and the men in that context ripe with desire?

Deciding on Community The reasons why both men and women remained at Pampas and Jacaranda illustrated what teachers desired in a workplace. The Pampas case showed how the goals of the Rural Program—to address the problem of teacher distribution and the inequity of educational opportunity—could be met.

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  93 The Rural School and Strong Schools programs made Pampas and Jacaranda financially attractive schools at which to work. Bonuses alone did not attract the teachers. The incentive programs added to the already attractive element of community present at both schools. Incentives are not only monetary (although in a context of economic instability, monetary incentives were desirable to all). Teachers also desire nonmonetary incentives, including being part of a community and a larger project than their economic well-being. In the next chapter, just how much teachers were willing to dedicate to build community is revealed in terms of extracurricular work, particularly care work. The ways teachers negotiate incentives are not so straightforward, linear, or simplistic. Analyses of incentives should not be either. While I focused on programs meant to entice teachers here, and have discussed several models, in the next chapter we shall learn how incentives directed at students involved teachers again, although unpaid, into extracurricular work and more care work. As a major emphasis in the neoliberal education reform agenda, incentives prominently emerged and were treated as such in this study. NOTES 1. Teachers completed a survey for which they were asked to self identify their class status. This line of questioning espoused Bourdieu’s (1984) conceptualization of class as relational, not determined solely by financial capital (Wright, 2005). Based on this framing, teachers’ responses would potentially differ from class identity determined by family income. What is unclear from this study’s data is how, if at all, the intersection of men’s gender and class identity might affect their decision-making about incentives. For example, would class identity limit men’s access to Rural Program Schools? Would there be working-class school communities in which men would not work? Whether middle or working class, would men be less concerned with safety, transportation, or community? Similarly, how might class further mediate women’s access to Rural Program schools? All the women in the study self-identified as middle class; might selfidentifying working-class women not face such barriers to Rural Schools? This is both a limitation of the data and a future research trajectory. 2. I have taken liberty with translation here to convey the meaning of the exchange. The contextualized translation of the survey question is “How do you get to school?” [Cómo llegás a la escuela?] Also, the geography professor’s response was literally, “With happy boots!” [¡Con botas felices!]

REFERENCES Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4(2), 139–158. Arrieta, W. (2010). What do teachers and their unions think about incentives? A case study of El Salvador. Paper presented at the Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference, Chicago, IL.

94  Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Ciccolella, P. & Mignaqui, I. (2002). Buenos Aires: Sociospatial impacts of the development of global city functions. In S. Sassen (Ed.), Global networks/linked cities (pp. 309–326). New York, NY: Routledge. Dirié, C. & Oiberman, I. (1999). La inserción laboral de los docentes en la Argentina [Teachers’ labor insertions in Argentina]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ministry of Education. Dore, E., & Molyneux, M. (Eds.). (2000). Hidden histories of gender and the state in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Duschatzky, S. (1999). La escuela como frontera: Reflexiones sobre la experiencia escolar de jóvenes de sectores populares [The school as a frontier: Reflections on the educational experiences of youth from impoverished sectors]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós. Estatuto Docente de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. (1957/2005). Ley 10579. Fischman, G. (2000). Imagining teachers: Rethinking gender dynamics in teacher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INDEC). (2001). Población total por sexo, razón de masculinidad y densidad de población, según provincia [Total population by sex, gender and population density, by province]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: The Author. Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INDEC). (2003). Incidencia de pobreza y de la indigencia en el Gran Buenos Aires [Incidence of poverty and indigence]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: The Author. Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INDEC). (2007). Incidencia de la pobreza y de la indigencia en 31 aglomerados urbanos [Incidence of poverty and indigence in 31 urban communities]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: The Author. Koza, J. (2003). To shave or not to shave: The hair-removal imperative and its implication for teachers and teaching. In J. Koza (Ed.), Stepping across: Four interdisciplinary studies of education and cultural politics (pp. 143–169). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Lavy, V. (2003). Paying for performance: The effect of individual financial incentives on teachers’ productivity and students’ scholastic outcomes. Unpublished manuscript, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Levitt, S.,  & Dubner, S. J. (2005). Freakonomics: A  rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Martin, P. Y. (2003). “Said and done” versus “saying and doing:” Gendering practices, practicing gender at work. Gender and Society, 17(3), 342–366. McKay Wilson, D. (2009). The invisible hand in education policy: Behind the scenes, economists wield unprecedented influence. Harvard Education Letter, 25(5), 1–3. Ministerio de Educación (2007). Informe indicative de salarios docentes, período julio-diciembre 2006 [Report on teacher salaries for the period July-December 2006]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: The Author. O’Connor, J. S., Orloff, A. S., & Shaver, S. (1999). States, markets, families: Gender, liberalism, and social policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Parker, I. (2010, May 17). The poverty lab: Transforming development economics, one experiment at a time. The New Yorker, 86(13), 78–89. Prendergast, C. (1999). The provision of incentives in firms. Journal of Economic Literature, 37, 7–63. Provincia de Buenos Aires (1957/2005). Estatuo Docente de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. (1957/2005). [Teacher Statute for the Province of Buenos Aires] Ley 10579.

Negotiating Incentives and Salary Bonuses  95 Ross, S. A. (1973). The economic theory of agency: The principal’s problem. American Economic Review, 62(2), 134–139. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. Umansky, I. (2005). A  literature review of teacher quality and incentives: Theory and evidence. In E. Vegas (Ed.), Incentives to improve teaching: Lessons from Latin America (pp. 21–61). Washington, DC: World Bank. Vegas, E. (Ed.). (2005). Incentives to improve teaching: Lessons from Latin America. Washington, DC: World Bank. Wright, E. O. (Ed.). (2005). Approaches to class analysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender & nation. London, England: Sage.

5 Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society

INTRODUCTION It would be unjust and incorrect to discuss teachers’ work only in terms of what hours are remunerated and what is done in front of the classroom. A great deal of the work to educate students takes place outside of classroom hours as teachers review and research content material, prepare classes alone and with colleagues, grade student work, and get to know students and the school community. Some responsibilities are made visible, for example, in policies specifying the submission of lesson plans or in collective bargaining contracts requiring faculty meetings. Most, however, are invisible. Making visible what is done beyond the classroom and out of view expands conceptualizations of teaching work. Critiquing what is done, for whom, why, and for what purpose challenges neoliberal assumptions that teachers can be “effective” if only re-created as technicians, and that educational problems can be easily resolved through standardization and accountability measures. In this chapter, I reveal various strains of teachers’ invisible, extracurricular work. I look at policy demands from the teachers’ perspectives and how teachers put those demands into practice to support the visible work of educating youth. At Pampas, I  examine two forms of extracurricular work. The first is teachers’ food work. I show how teachers and principals addressed hunger, but in the process do more work unaccounted for by the public, policy, or in pay. Three new roles are uncovered: food advocates/activists, food managers, and service providers/caregivers. This invisible policy work reflects ubiquitous development programs instituted in developing and developed nations to improve childhood nutrition and attract populations at the highest risk of dropping out of school with food offered in exchange for attendance. The food work also reflects global discourses that schools can educate students when/if schools become social service hubs and teachers become more than just teachers but rather street-level bureaucrats fulfilling multiple professional roles.

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  97 The second form of extracurricular work at Pampas is the growing demand for paperwork, from submitting lesson plans to daily productivity reports. I analyze how teachers and administrators confront the demands for accountability, at times resisting and at other times using the reports to make visible a different set of demands emanating from the marginalized populations the teachers worked within. Similar to plans adopted around the world, the paperwork reflects accountability measures, which are premised on the notion that teachers and administrators can be controlled, their actions shaped by surveillance to achieve another set of goals. At Jacaranda I further examine the Strong Schools Program, which I began to elaborate in Chapter 4. Strong Schools [Fortaleza Escolar] demands that selected teachers provide advising on academic and personal issues to students and their families. While the work provides bonus salary to the teachers, it adds to their out-of-classroom, and out-of-school hours responsibilities. Additionally it demands a very different set of professional skills and knowledge that the teachers do not possess. I examine how they negotiate the responsibilities while also negotiating a new area of expertise and the implications for doing so. Reflective of development programs to keep marginalized or underrepresented groups in school, Strong Schools raises questions about where teachers’ work and expertise end and other school professionals’ work and expertise begins. The teachers’ tenuous step across professional boundaries also tugs at concerns for maintaining their professional status, often undermined by programs and policies. The data reveal that despite enormous efforts to reform teaching, there are elements untouched and/or invisible in policy text and discourse, as well as unanticipated consequences of reform programs. Of particular interest was extracurricular work beyond the classroom and far beyond notions of secondary teachers’ responsibilities, which demands teachers’ time, resources, and emotional labor. I turn to two gendered theories of labor to understand the extracurricular work, related policies, and impact on teachers and teaching. Specifically, I analyze how teachers frame their extracurricular responsibilities in terms of a gendered occupational hierarchy through the conceptual dichotomy of public/private social spheres. Joan Acker’s (1990) fifth interactive process of occupational gendering elaborates the creation of and conceptualization of social structures such as job hierarchies into organizational logic and material forms that capture it, such as written work rules, managerial directives, and job evaluations. Teachers struggled against and within a gendered job hierarchy cemented with a logic that places work and the teachers’ doing it on an unequal ladder. The teaching hierarchy is most prominent across grade levels. Amassed on the lower rungs of that ladder are women teaching younger children. Their pay, work conditions, prestige, and professional education are lower and more precarious. Women are in the majority in secondary education, but many men teach at this level too. Men and women together meet the needs of students. The collaborative struggles illustrate that men and women

98  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society strive to stave off de-professionalization of secondary teaching but do so by differentiating their secondary education work from their elementary counterparts. An implication of extracurricular work is not only a burden on time and resources, but also the fortification of a barrier to broadening the struggle against extracurricular work to include teachers across the job hierarchy. The false division of a public work world and a private life proves useful to tease out where policy falls short of controlling teachers. Feminist scholars have argued away the absolute dichotomy of two spheres of society in theoretical and empirical work. They have forwarded many sketches of how the two spheres overlap, are porous, or are related. The invisibility of extracurricular duties may open a debate regarding the absolute control that any state—even the neoliberal one—can have over the public sphere work it presumably governs. Yet also convenient is the ability of the state, and of the teachers to overlook or downplay responsibilities performed outside of the classroom and even the school building, school day and academic year. While feminist scholarship illuminates the ways private lives and public work spill into each other, social actors continue to draw on the terms to attempt to differentiate one from the other. In the case of teachers, policies do not take into account the full extent of invisible out-of-school work performed by teachers, but, because it is done beyond school walls, teachers downplay the work, or hide it as private. Pampas and Jacaranda teachers struggle to carve out time beyond the classroom to grade papers, prepare lessons, and meet with colleagues to plan new courses. They struggle because these are not the only responsibilities they must fulfill in order to educate youth. Reforms aimed at every facet of teaching attempt to bring teachers under control, yet perennial nonteaching duties remain untouched and/or overlooked by policy makers. I argue in this chapter that secondary-level teaching is going through a process of feminization. Secondary teachers’ involvement in more care work such as feeding or counseling students inserts new skills, roles, and responsibilities into the workday. Care work is not prestigious, not rewarded, and more often than not, unacknowledged. Yet it is the foundation from which teachers educate students in history, for example. Previously associated with primary teaching, feminized extracurricular work is creeping upward through the professional hierarchy with uncertain implications. The care work does not blend with conceptualizations of teaching held by the teachers and circulating with neoliberal education reform. Last, teachers desire control over all of their work, but most important is control over being a classroom teacher, educating students in a discipline. They negotiate policy demands that expand the boundaries of their teaching. Teachers may take on extracurricular work. They may even go after extracurricular work. Teachers also may do a lot of invisible homework. However, they do so in order to maintain a view of their work as

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  99 professional. They wish for their work to be focused on educating students in discipline-specific knowledge and on preparing students for a future role in society, their specialized skill sets that distinguish them from other professions and even from other teachers. They actively engage in defining the teaching profession, pushing out the contours of that definition while also shoring up the boundaries between high school teaching and other types. The chapter begins with a description of local policies that demand extracurricular work. In the description, global neoliberal reform discourses are elaborated illustrating links to local policy logic. Following the descriptions are the findings of each policy’s demands and teachers’ policy practices. This format continues to reveal the complex decision-making and sense-making that characterize teachers’ policy enactment. I then analyze the findings as revealing a feminization of secondary teaching. I conclude with teachers’ insights about the meaning of being a global teacher, navigating the complexities of educating locally for a global, unjust, and abstract agenda. NATIONAL STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM The National Student Scholarship Program [Programa Nacional de Becas Estudiantiles] was initiated in the Province of Buenos Aires with funds channeled to the national state from the Inter-American Development Bank. Similar to conditional cash transfers (Mirais de Sá e Silva, 2012), the program’s objective was “to provide material support to students in vulnerable socioeconomic situations strengthening their basic [social] conditions so that they can remain in school” (Ministerio de Educación, n.d.).

No Scholarly Demands Pampas’s Assistant Principal, Josefina Ramazzotti, explained that the program was “exactly for the purpose of feeding the student as well as the family.” Neither Ministry nor bank officials managed the program or sent officials to monitor it. And the policy implicitly demanded schools administer the program for poor families, setting up a caregiving hierarchy: dependency on the ministry to distribute funds to schools, which in turn distributed cash to families. History teacher and interim school director Esteban Polanco described schools as “the last jewel of the state, the last remnant of what the state was.” Dussel, Tiramonti, and Birgin (2000) foreshadowed Polanco’s experience by drawing attention to the rising demands that the state placed on schools as the welfare system was dismantled. Polanco explained, “We should talk about a whole process of the State pulling away from State enterprises and so forth. Within that framework you get, among other things, a rise in the unemployment rate that we are still going through.” Persistent unemployment and under-employment in the

100  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society area around Pampas manifested within schools as hunger, leading teachers to seek out the scholarship program. To receive the scholarship, families had to demonstrate financial hardship deemed a risk for a 14- to 17-year-old to complete secondary education. Ramazzotti explained what “financial hardship” meant: “families earn[ing] less than $500 Argentine pesos/month, more than $200 below the poverty line for the Province.” However, students and families who met the criteria had to attend a school where faculty and administrators secured classification as an authorized school. No funding was provided to run the program. “The scholarship [program] depends on each school director to do it or not to do it,” explained Lautaro Morales. Or as Alejandra Espina explained, “the scholarships are administered from the school.” Pampas’s educators held meetings to inform families, ensured that all paperwork was completed and submitted to the Province, and distributed funds prior to acceptance deadlines. This differed from conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil where program dissemination relied on public service announcements (Morais de Sá e Silva, 2012). However, reliance on school personnel echoes the Bolivian system of subsidies [Subsidios]. In Argentina (and perhaps Bolivia), the state manipulated the relational qualities of caring inherent in the policy. While representing the state’s role of providing care to marginalized families, teachers administered the caring for a disappearing, distant hierarchy. The impact of the care work was questioned. Lautaro Morales, a history teacher, stated, “In reality the scholarship, the only thing it accomplishes, is a function of containment.” The scholarship contained students haphazardly in school, contained poor families with a bit more income, and contained teachers to care work rather than educating. Morales’s comment reflected Morais de Sá e Silva’s (2012) statement that the causes of poverty are “seen as structural, related to the history and development of each country” (p. 315). Morales elaborated that current Argentine patterns of territorialization affecting teachers’ practices also redefine national membership. Do the poor students belong in the national imagery negotiated in schools? The limits of the program and, as described below, haphazard oversight suggest not. The program was structurally haphazard. Program guidelines set by provincial, national, and international lenders seesawed yearly, but one element remained constant: Teachers, staff, and administrators administered it without pay or acknowledgement. This differed from the Bolivian model mentioned above. It remains unclear whether the program borrowers or lenders (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004) had thought about who would administer the program. This stands in stark contrast to critiques of educational development programs as epitomized by the exclusion of local experts (p. 206). No international experts were encountered at schools or mentioned. Some change occurred year-to-year that was beyond the control of teachers, serving as an annual reminder that while teachers controlled the

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  101 administration of the program, they had no control over its substance. Program variations included: the amount awarded, acceptance and disbursement dates, eligibility, and number of scholarships. The scholarships ranged from US$200–300. These unknowns presented a hardship for all. As assistant principal Ramazzotti explained: Teachers and administrators had to go and look for students and their families because the provincial government sent awardees’ letters to the school after [students] left for winter and end-of-year vacation. Students and families must sign an acceptance form by a deadline in order not to lose the award. So the only option for teachers and staff was to go door-to-door looking for all the award winners. Anonymous policy makers also failed to account for the impact of changes. Teachers worked from mid-February to mid-December according to collective bargaining agreements. Yet teachers administered the program year round. Ministry officials who did not have a street-level view of policy implementation failed to see how policy timelines differed from the school year, technically closed during summer vacation. Some of the disconnect between the street and policy makers can be explained by what policy borrowing literature suggests is a need to please. “One of the reasons why governments borrow policy models . . . is to please donors and thus receive funding” (Morais de Sá e Silva, 2012, p. 319). The policy demands may have been generated at the national level to appease external lenders. Demands were passed on to teachers in the form of a borrowed policy with no national-level political will to administer it. The lack of a street-level view also helps explain the absence of pay or acknowledgement for services rendered.

Community Practice Teachers performed the policy work during school breaks, vacations, and in nonnstructional hours. The scholarships only reached recipients if educators worked extra hours to locate families and prepare paperwork. They were not paid and it was not part of collectively bargained work descriptions. By failing to remunerate teachers’ policy work, the policies reflected the lack of acknowledgement and value placed on care work. Teachers and administrators administered the program so that students’ needs were addressed by one of the few social services offered. That is, the schools became social service outposts. In 2005 the school turned away students because of changing qualifications, including families’ lack of legal documents and legal confirmation of address. Nevertheless, Ramazzotti believed it was her responsibility to administer the program because the community so desperately needed the help. This suggests that teachers’ behavior is tied to their concern for “rescuing the child” and the family, or

102  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society administering “pastoral care” (Popkewitz, 1998). The teachers, however, revealed no sense of normalizing or disciplining or saving the poor neoliberal subjects, unless connecting families in need of money is construed as such. Teachers were critical of the broader national development scheme that did little to support education and their students’ opportunities of even becoming visible neoliberal subjects. What remained uncritical, uncritiqued, was all the work demanded of them. While school-based work was outlined in detail on the program website, district and provincial education officials overlooked program administration in relation to educating in a poor school. Also invisible was the gendered nature of the care work. A woman secretary, a woman assistant principal, and a number of men and women proctors, or record keepers, performed behind-the-scenes paperwork. Men and women teachers were doing the care work required to make the scholarship program accessible to students. Men, more likely to have cars (Robert, 2013), drove to the provincial capital to demand services. In a seemingly disorganized, chaotic fashion, men and women educators travelled together to La Plata, the provincial capital, to drop off and pick up documents and lodge complaints regarding administrative issues such as the disbursement of funds to families. This organizing took place as teachers passed each other in hallways or during coffee breaks. Women and men teachers assume the established, gendered domestic roles of the caregiver and the provider. Moreover, this assumption of responsibility in part plays upon established public myths that equate school community to an extended family, with the teacher playing surrogate parent to the infantilized poor family. There is a degree of reciprocity. Teachers assume gendered roles that are established paradigms of teaching behavior, albeit for elementary teachers. Simultaneously the teachers must confront the implications of assuming such roles, now grafted onto professional practices in which these expectations conflict.

UNIVERSAL SNACK PROGRAM

The Context Demands The second program, the Universal Snack Program, was funded by the Province of Buenos Aires and the national state to provide additional nourishment to all students to support learning. Similar programs are also a staple in so-called developing and developed nations around the globe. The Universal Snack Program was similar to the scholarship program: Both provided support to students to continue their education and were 100% administered by faculty and staff. It differed from the scholarships in two ways. First, the snack program provided food in school rather than funding for food at

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  103 home. Second, the snack provided at school was the result of teachers’ pushing for a reinterpretation of the parameters of a provincial feeding program that had been limited to elementary schools. Elementary school snacks have existed for over a hundred years in Argentina’s public and private schools ((Robert & Kovalskys, 2011)), but there had been no comprehensive plan in place for adolescents. Throughout the 20th century, the percentage of the population attending elementary and secondary schools grew dramatically. Argentina had close to 100% enrolment at the primary level. By 1999, 85% of high school-aged students attended (UNESCO, n.d.), even though high school was not mandatory until 2005. The schoolfeeding model did not keep pace with the increased number of students in elementary schools who continued into secondary schools. Nor did it keep pace with the percentage of the population living in poverty. At the time this research was conducted, the program was haphazardly funded and disseminated, even more so because of the state budget crises beginning in 2001.

Teachers Practice Needed Policy Pampas’s in-school snack program was, in the words of teacher Monica Alvarez, the “result of teachers’ demands” [“producto de la exigencia de los docentes”]. In 2004 when a Pampas’ student passed out during school because she had not eaten in days, teachers’ involvement in feeding intensified. Teachers and administrators were aware of persistent economic difficulties for students and their families. Many educators chose to work in Pampas because they believed these conditions to be unjust and believed in the youths’ rights to education. The student’s fainting thus served as a new call to action. With the school principal’s guidance (Acosta at that time), teachers initiated a dialogue with students. Many students revealed that they were hungry. Some students came to school hungry while others avoided school altogether, ashamed of their families’ inability to feed them. Many entered the workforce out of necessity rather than attend school. Hunger was a complex problem that motivated the educators and community members to take action. Feeding students was a logistically complex problem. The high school was not built with feeding in mind. There was no kitchen or cafeteria, no staff to store, prepare, distribute, or order food. Any funding to be secured would entail challenging the limited parameters of the national schoolfeeding program (Britos, O’Donnell, Ugalde, & Rodrigo, 2003; Robert, 2011). The teachers did not assume that they needed to look externally at other national contexts for a school food model. While school food programs are popular global development initiatives, no internalization of a “foreign” policy to the local context was needed (Phillips, 2004). Rather what was needed was for teachers to synthesize Argentina’s school food program to reach a broader swath of school-aged children.

104  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society Bringing a feeding program to the school also meant challenging the traditional parameters of high school teaching work, which teachers conceived of not as care work, but rather (and as opposed to their elementary counterparts), as involving teaching disciplinary knowledge, epistemology, and methodology. While many teachers echoed Alberto Membrives’s comment that feeding students was important—“one of the gravest problems that the society had”—he also stated, “we [high school teachers] have a different preparation as high school teachers, we have another preparation [than elementary teachers] and we work with different elements.” Membrives continues that high school teachers are “people assemblers.” Mario Macaya agreed that his work was to listen and to create thinkers who would be citizens. “Unfortunately,” Morales confessed, “for the moment the high school has become [the place] where youth are . . . contained and fed. Look, [a teacher] has to fulfill a role that is not theirs, [the teacher] comes to teach.” Unfortunately, these teachers were not teaching history, but dealing with a lack of nutrition. Teachers were not attending to social problems simply because they cared, or because policy framed them as pastoral caregivers (Popkewitz, 1998). They did so because they were aware of the broader economic and educational structures of oppression that created poverty (Morais de Sá e Silva, 2012), and used their agency to affect it. Educators pooled resources, collecting money, food items, and supplies and implementing a short-term solution: snack time for adolescent students similar to that in elementary schools. The snack was served to students at their desks during instructional time. Students refused the snack unless it was offered to the entire class; those suffering from hunger refused to be identified as needy (Russell, et al., 2007). Even when the program served all students, Morales pointed out how students tucked snacks away in desks, not because they were not hungry but because, he claimed, they were embarrassed. A long-term plan was needed to sustain a universal food program. School officials, along with students, parents, and community members, collectively pursued funding from education and social service agencies to extend the plan indefinitely. They approached district and provincial government to build a kitchen in the school’s courtyard. Teachers’ advocacy, which fell outside the scope of contracts, was entirely voluntary and unpaid, as was work by students, staff, and the community. Travel back and forth to the district headquarters and provincial capital was not reimbursed. Each collaborator donated time and effort. The advocacy was a form of care work and of public policy work interpreting and implementing policy on the ground based on value judgments, coping mechanisms, and loopholes or ambiguities within rules or systems (Lipsky, 1980). Within a year, this plan began to take shape. District governing bodies provided financial support for a kitchen, a food service worker, and food delivery. By 2005, the program was in place, due to the persistence of teachers who convinced government officials that all students deserved

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  105 a nutritious school snack. Teachers could turn their attention to instruction with their days as food activists over. However, each day during snack time, instruction stopped. Teachers were reminded of how their work remained changed. “As Wolfowitz reminds us, agency is not the same as resistance and neither factors are necessarily socially transformative, they can serve as ‘strategies whereby workers carve out a space for themselves that allows some degree of control [and] may actually contribute to the reproduction of relations of domination’ ” (as cited in Braun, 2011, p. 279–280). Teachers were conscious that the feeding program was not socially transformative as they stepped out of their history teacher roles to administer snacks. PATROLLING PROFESSIONALS

Demanding Lesson Plans and Reports Monica Alvarez was Pampas’s Social Science Director. She took the position to earn extra income without having to travel to another school (see Chapter 4). In 2004 the Province began to require that all directors prepare and have available teachers’ lesson plans. Alvarez was responsible for meeting this mandate. This was not an easy task because she had to ask repeatedly for lessons and then catalogue them in a three-ring binder available for inspectors on government-sized paper (similar to US legal document-sized paper). She had access to a different size photocopy machine at school so reformatting official documents and teachers’ documents was her tedious responsibility. It also cost her; she paid for the photocopies out of pocket the first years. The following exchange reflects her experience: MA:    Size A4 is small. All the plans were prepared on official sheet [size], the sheet is much bigger. I had to shrink all the documents! SAR:  Who pays? MA:    What a great question that you ask me, great question! Imagine, imagine who pays?! Last year I paid for all of it out of pocket and this year I  said, no, I’ll do the file and when the money comes in for . . . each department gets a small amount of money . . . I will use that money to do it. The lesson plan records required far more hours than Alvarez was compensated for as department director. For a time she paid the state for her work; she paid to have her director position, though no prestige was garnered beyond the title. Alvarez also had to grade homework as a classroom teacher, as well as complete her administrative commitments, frequently accomplished at home, and unaccounted for in her paid hours. Both drained her emotional and financial resources. It was unclear whether the inspectors reviewed the lesson plan folder. While policies are being implemented and intensified in schools around the

106  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society world, to what end other than wearing teachers down, and shifting their time and energy to administrative tasks, do they serve? Accountability measures are premised on improving education for students. Yet on the ground the lesson plan submission policy does little more than demand busywork from teachers.

Demanding Recognition The interim principal, Esteban Polanco, captured the invisibility of and the conflict between policy demands and teachers’ work in the following anecdote. He describes how the previous principal, Roberto Acosta, was reprimanded by an inspector, the next level up from principal in a long hierarchy of administrators, for not submitting bureaucratic paperwork [papeleo]. One time, the inspector reprimanded, in writing, Roberto Acosta [the previous principal]. A week passed and the inspector demanded an explanation in writing, with signature, to be delivered to district offices (mail is not used to send official documents). Acosta was to explain why he had committed the imprudent and irresponsible act of not presenting official administrative documents. Acosta took the opportunity to write and tell her [the inspector] what he had resolved for the school [community] the week he did not deliver his official paperwork. So he wrote: “I met with a father . . . with the student’s family that did not have food and we tried to brainstorm how to resolve this, with another [family] that did not have shoes, with a teacher who needed help, with a domestic violence problem in another family. As I was attending to all of these issues . . .” . . . [A]nd so the story goes that the inspector apologized, said she felt bad, let’s say, and told him that she did not know that schools had to deal with all of these issues . . . I think this reflects a little bit the disconnection there is between these levels. We feel that. We get reprimanded constantly. We avoid paperwork. . . . Because we get one or two days behind in handing in a certain document and we are always left with the feeling: they don’t know how it is in schools today, where we work. Schoolwork was invisible to an extensive and distant education and development bureaucracy. Acosta strongly believed in serving the school community. He understood that some of the paperwork demanded of him was a necessary evil because in Acosta and Polanco’s words, “teachers and administrators are not homogenous.” That is, not all educators cared for school communities as Pampas did. The same bureaucracy that demanded paperwork did not recognize this. The two demands, in a sense, created a double burden for teachers and administrators, embedding a version of

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  107 the family and workplace demands juggled by mothers who are employed outside the home, except this version affected women and men in their workplace. Acosta’s example suggests that he also used the necessary evil of submitting paperwork as a form of praxis (Freire, 2000). Upon reflection of his work world, he took action in order to change it. His way of changing it is by revealing the invisible and intense emotional labor his work required. Rather than sterilizing his report by writing only to his supervisors’ incomplete version of his work, he used the required responsibility to contaminate and complicate the limited concepts of teaching work held by the inspector. Much neoliberal reform reflects the supervisor’s ignorance. As elaborated in previous chapters, policies evolved from abstract economic and social theories rarely contain evidence of any knowledge of what teachers do on Monday (and every other day of the week too). Acosta demanded recognition and used the accountability measure to seek it. INVISIBLE HOMEWORK

Time on Our Side at Jacaranda Teachers at both schools juggled invisible responsibilities throughout the academic year. In Chapter 2 I elaborated the difference between class hours and what the teachers were paid. Jacaranda teachers worked hora cátedra (teach 40 minutes, 20 minutes to be used at their discretion: more instruction, student-driven projects, one-on-one support, grading, or planning if a team-taught class). They also had block schedules; class periods were longer. The pay and class structure allowed teachers to complete some of their homework. The discretionary nature of the work schedule does not conform to a global press to account for and structure work time. The concern for keeping workers on task to increase productivity has intensified. Yet the Jacaranda teachers schedule conflicts with this global push. The Jacaranda schedule reflects elements of flexibility that course through a new work structure reflected in Silicon Valley technology companies and entrepreneurial start-ups. The teachers are trusted professionals capable of performing their job without supervision. The unstructured time even offers them the opportunity for creativity. The shift away from the hora catedra in recent years in other provinces, however, suggests that the system is a remnant of a previous era.

No Time Pampas teachers worked hora reloj [clocked hour] (60 minute classes with the expectation that teachers were instructing the entire time). Monica

108  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society Alvarez, the Social Science director, struggled under the weight of grading and planning. She had a foot-high stack of papers on her Formica kitchen table. When the national teachers’ union called for a national strike, she took advantage of the day off to catch up on her invisible homework. None of the teachers or staff in this study participated in the national march, though they all lived a short distance from the event. Instead of participating in political activity, teachers in my study used their private time to do their public and, in the case of Pampas teachers, no longer recognized or paid work because they had no other time to do so. Teachers’ unpaid planning and grading work potentially eats into free time to the detriment of political organizing, activism, and collaboration with teachers at their own school or around the nation.

Getting Homework Done Regardless of their workday structure, teachers all reported having homework. That is, they graded, planned, and prepared for future instruction during unpaid hours of their lives. Jacaranda’s Carmen Barral cancelled three interviews and observations due to her backlog of grading at midyear and at the end. Barral and her Jacaranda colleagues worked and were remunerated under the old payment system (hora catedra). Yet even their work was not paid in full. What do we call invisible homework? Teachers struggled to clarify and classify their responsibilities. For example, Ana Estela Rubinstein and Romina Astudillo asked me to clarify a survey question: How many hours do you work weekly? Rubinstein was direct, parsing and critiquing the question immediately. She asked, “Paid and unpaid hours?” She explained that with 30 years’ seniority she had organized her workweek such that she taught three long days (12–14 hour days!) a week and graded or planned two days a week. With experience, she could gauge how much out of school time she needed to prepare inschool activities. Though she had no minimum on her teaching hours, she kept her class hours to 30 to accommodate unpaid homework. At 60 years old, she felt tired, admitting, “It is not a good rhythm, for sure.” Astudillo organized her week differently. She graded two to three hours a night. She reported, “I am including those hours in my longest day because that is how many hours I am working right now.” Astudillo assured me that she worked unpaid hours away from school grading papers. The extra time her position demanded was particularly on her mind when we met in June near the end of the first trimester of classes. When asked how many hours she put in on her longest workday, she told me she did not want to limit her answer to the in-school labor she performed and so she added four more hours to reflect this unpaid time. Astudillo’s homework volume varied during the year. At times she had more to grade, more to

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  109 plan. However, she always had homework. As Rubinstein clarified: “All the work is never paid for.” Elena Agostini complicates the classification of work hours further. “If I was to describe to you Wednesday; Wednesday is a different day. Every day is distinct.” Wednesday and Friday, for example, are spent in meetings: with her department, with her tutored students and their families, with the staff and all of the faculty, and with individual colleagues with whom she team teaches. She also dedicates some of Wednesday and Friday to reviewing student files and researching student problems (e.g., grades, conduct, graduation progress, personal issues). Agostini described these as common responsibilities of teachers that fall beyond the classroom. She did not immediately include the long list of duties in her description of teaching work. As revealed below, she refused to acknowledge the grading and planning required of teachers as part of her public work. Yet these responsibilities are real, just privately performed.

Private Work Teachers not only work to support student learning while in front of the classroom. They also complete crucial responsibilities for classroom instruction at home and outside school hours. Rubinstein and Astudillo called this “unpaid work.” Elena Agostini did not want to talk about or acknowledge her unpaid work. She insisted, “I will explain my work when I am at school to you. When I am at home that is personal. That is personal. . . . It has nothing to do with [teaching] work.” Yet with prodding Agostini confessed, “Well, there are many weekends when I dedicate the entire afternoon, for example, preparing assessments, but it is not a regular thing.” She continues to separate her work from her private life. EA:    Free time is free time, it is mine and it is personal, my private life. What I mean is that we invest lots of time and lots of energy and lots of work in the classroom . . . in the school. Obviously, at times there is no other option than to do [work] at home, but anything that can be done during work hours, I think, is very reasonable. SAR: To you, then, there is a clear division between private life and teaching work. EA:    A clear divide. Yes, I don’t have that problem. When I leave [the school] my work schedule ends, my specific work responsibilities [end]. And then, afterwards, my life [begins]. Since the beginning of the second wave of feminism, the organization of women’s lives into two spheres—a public sphere and a private

110  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society sphere—has been critiqued. Of concern has been whether the spheres (and women’s lives) are so neatly divided between home and work and, if not, what the relationship is between the public and private spheres. How do women organize their lives as family life, with paid or out-of-home responsibilities tugging at their petticoats and their emotions? Not evident in the exchange above was the tone and emotion that inflected Agostini’s statements. She is an outspoken woman and there were no soft edges to her demeanor. She spoke directly, never mincing words, immediately firing answers at me even if the answer was, “I don’t know the answer.” When speaking of her personal life, her tone and facial gestures suggested anger and annoyance that I was asking questions about something that was none of my business. She freely discussed every detail of her work within the school in long interviews and observations. However, except for this short exchange she would not talk about invisible homework she so clearly performed. Why? Turning to Joan Acker’s (1990) discussion of the interactive gendering processes of occupations, perhaps Agostini’s policing of her work boundaries is not so much to deny homework completed. She confessed to spending whole afternoons doing schoolwork at home. Rather, she wished to define her work by the instruction, the engagement with students and with the broader school community. She wished to reinforce the complex tasks of instructing students and diminish the responsibilities that are not that difficult. Yet, difficult or easy, by dividing the tasks that add up to the sum of teaching, and where these tasks are accomplished, she denies her own work efforts. Furthermore, she denies her own negotiation of the responsibilities of the two spheres. Teachers are negotiating the two spheres plus the spillover of public work into their private lives. Doing so reinforces and bolsters a silent and invisible intensification of their paid work beyond the confines of paid hours. When the Province shifted to hora reloj, more instruction was demanded. This led to an intensification of unpaid labor completed at home during evenings and weekends. For Pampas teachers with long commutes, this translated to an overall intensification of work. In the following exchange I picked up on Elena Agostini’s comment about public work/private life to probe another teachers’ conceptualization of the divide. SAR:  How do you divide your public life, or teaching, from your private life? Is there a division? MONICA: In the last few years my time is dominated by work. Perhaps my case is unique because I don’t have a nuclear family; for those who have a husband and children, it’s much more complicated. However, even though I am single, my free time is practically . . . look, I have to grade all this. I do not do this in the classroom, during my [paid] work hour. I have to do it in my time outside of work. It takes me hours to do this work at

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  111 home . . . which would be my free time because all that time they do not pay me. Free time is very limited, very limited. This kept getting worse in the last few years. SAR:    Why did it get worse? MONICA: Well, because now there is more concern about losing work, losing hours. Also, what happens is that maybe you have the same number of work hours, but they are more draining, this makes one tired too. (Interview, May 19, 2005) Alvarez suggests that emotional demands of schoolwork intensified with increased out-of-school responsibilities. Rather than a divide, the exchange suggests that she had no private life. Her life was dominated by work responsibilities. She downplays this change when she confides that she does not have a partner or children to care for. Yet Alvarez takes the encroachment of public work into her private life personally: MA: Related with pedagogy, if the student has to do homework and has to do work, a test, she/he takes the test, the student does not study, anything, and she/he puts down whatever response on the test or hands the test in blank, I come here [home] and sit down to grade, I am losing time because I do not see results, you do not see that the test was productive and it’s your time that you lose and it’s time that you waste; you have to redo the test or you have to figure out how to assess students to try to raise their grades a little. And all that [work] makes the [job] very alienating, very alienating. As the quote suggests, she did not mind the homework if it yielded results on tests or on homework. It did not. Like Agostini, Alvarez would not mind, might even gloss over her homework. However Agostini was deeply affected by her homework because not only did it eat into her private life but it reflected a lack of student learning. The students’ blank and/or failed assessments did not signal that she could move on to her next lessons. Instead, they signaled the need for more planning, which because of her hora reloj schedule meant more homework. The demands of public work impact teachers’ private lives, which, unfortunately leads back to the classroom and to more homework, a vicious cycle. Teachers must keep up with their jobs for students’ sake to the detriment of their own and some, like Alvarez, feel very alienated with the profession as a result. The amount of grading and planning that teachers do is difficult to calculate because it is done outside of schools and varies from teacher to teacher. Several Pampas teachers shared their strategies for minimizing out-of-class work by grading while students worked on an in-class assignments. However, none had found a way to avoid unpaid labor, which ate into their private lives. This additional work coincides with the increasingly unequal distribution of

112  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society domestic labor in societies around the globe (Chen, Vanek, Flund, & Heintz, 2005; Standing, 1999). The finding that teachers’ out-of-school work fell outside the parameters of salary arrangements at this particular moment of increasing homework merits further exploration in future research. It is important to articulate the nature and scope of homework women and men teachers performed to make visible the invisible work they all do.

DEMANDING A DIFFERENT PROFESSIONAL, BUT TEACHERS WILL DO

Strong Schools Strong Schools [Fortaleza Escolar] was introduced in Chapter 4. It requires high schools to provide weekly one-on-one counseling to first- and second-year students and their families. Families directed to state services still exist to cover the cost of school supplies, drug/alcohol addiction, and general psychological counseling. Families also are offered the reassurance that teachers were watching over students, ensuring homework was done and attendance did not drop. Sofia Corti, Jacaranda’s headmaster, explained that she had hoped life could be better in Argentina despite ongoing economic and public education crises. “If one does not have hope that things can change, [one] would not become a teacher.” For this reason, the school’s administration attempted to implement the Strong Schools program, taking all responsibility to administer it and staff it. Specific to teachers, Corti hoped the program would address teachers’ concerns over decreasing instructional time due to students’ increasing need for assistance with studies and personal lives. Social actors are conscious of oppression (Giddens, 1979), able to acknowledge it and, in certain instances, act on that knowledge. However the program manipulated teachers’ emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983), expanding care beyond the high school teachers’ concern for teaching history. Rudimentary regulations meant that the school administered the program with no extra staff. The program required the school to hire tutors, as the counselors were called, with educational credentials. Pedagogical supervisor, Graciela García, was responsible for distributing the limited number of paid hours. By paying unqualified teachers as caseworkers, the government program formally inserted care work into high schools. This was accomplished in part because educators wanted to earn more money to bolster salaries that did not keep up with inflation and the cost of living (Diríe & Oiberman, 1999). The care work demanded more of teachers who wanted more pay and more time to teach history, fueling a “dilemma-driven educational workplace” (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013, p. 4). They were assigned a class cohort, an average of 30 students in either first or second year. Unfortunately, the pay did not cover the work demands. Tutors were paid for two hours of tutoring a week, but put in more.

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  113 Garcia noted that demand for counseling intensified teachers’ work prior to the program. Parents’ demands took on a different character leading up to and after the 2001 economic crisis. Instead of participating in the parent organization and meeting with school officials over academic issues, parents turned to teachers for social and psychological aid. “The crisis,” Corti explained, “was just the culmination of the process by which high school teachers’ work began to involve handling many more social problems: violence, hunger, no money, unemployed parents, drug, and alcohol addiction.” So the program at least recognized two hours of work per week. Teachers paid attention to the crisis that entered their school. This led to “acts of creativity,” the need to break from their habitual routine (Bourdieu, 1990) to address the crisis, leading the teachers to “establish new relationships between themselves and their work environment” (Braun, 2011, p. 279).

Practicing the Work of Social Workers and Guidance Counselors The program paid teachers for care work outside classrooms. While all the women embodied the feminine and feminized teacher, the policy demanded a teacher performance they struggled with and struggled to keep out of their classroom. When students made requests on their time beyond instructional assistance during class, the teachers regularly told students “see your tutor” and moved discussion back to the curriculum. The teachers felt the contradiction of practicing a new professional skill set on multiple levels, admitting that they possessed limited training and skills; they confessed that Strong Schools required a different set of professional skills and knowledge than they had as classroom teachers. Some confessed to learning as they went along or enrolling in psychology courses to better perform the work. As Carmen Barral simply confessed, “you learn because no one is going to teach you.” No formal preparation was required to acquire or to keep the positions. Teacher-tutors realized that they replaced skilled workers (e.g., social workers, psychologists). They also realized that their work, and potentially their professional identities, were transformed. Care work was new and the teachers fought to be respected as professionals, not helpers or second mothers, as teachers are symbolically viewed in Argentina (Fischman, 2000). [Teaching is] a profession, vocation. . . . I know I am not these kids’ mom, nor sister, I am their teacher. My primordial mission is to impart in them a certain [academic] discipline that I understand, and to help them, accompany them . . . after all, they are 12, 13, 15 years old, they are kids . . . I help them if they have a problem that I can help with, but my primordial mission is not to entertain them, nor to cure their ills, it is to teach them history in a cordial manner. (Interview with Elena Agostini)

114  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society With Elena Agostini’s references to not being her students’ “mom” or “sister,” she tied care work to gendered roles and expectations, but did not want to embody them (Haase, 2008). The specific care work to which she objected was the work she did not do in front of the class, like Strong Schools (though she was a tutor). She attempted to draw a line between care work and teaching, but it was drawn in sand. Agostini resisted the feminization of history teaching, but was a tutor. DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS: ANALYZING A FEMINIZATION PROCESS The gendered dynamics of neoliberal ideology are complex. Even as teachers’ work is devalued by assumptions that it is easily transcribed into parts and steps, that work is also looked upon as a realm—indeed, the only realm—through which student achievement is “potentially open to policy influence” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, cited in Connell, 2009, p. 214). Teachers’ invisible care work fills the gaps left by the retraction of welfare services. Accountability measures also creep into the realm of secondary teachers’ work. The findings reveal that in this context policies exist that presumed student achievement will be influenced if only lesson plans and daily productivity reports are submitted in a specific format on a specific sized paper. Indeed neoliberalism has been “liberally applied” in Argentina too (SteinerKhamsi, Silova, and Johnson, 2006) not so much to account for behavior that leads to particular outcomes but to control and constrain teachers in ways that do not support education. Employing a research methodology that emphasizes policy analysis from teachers’ perspectives rather than from government documents reveals the angst caused to teachers by liberally instituted programs. It also exposes the disconnect between the application of programs and a rhetoric of accountability that emphasizes improved outcomes without acknowledging the practical implications of program implementation. The gender-analytic approach to analyzing the policy findings reveals a shifting conceptualization of teaching occurring, a shift toward secondary teachers being second mothers. As the findings suggest care work (paid and unpaid) and an increase in invisible homework performed at school and at home crept into teachers’ work. Connell (2005) describes neoliberal ideology as bringing about a “gradual decomposition of gender orders” (p.  1804). This is reflected in the findings that illustrate an upward movement of feminized and feminine skills and tasks into the work of secondary teachers. Situated within the traditionally feminized profession of teaching, this is not so striking. Yet, teaching has its own gender order, a hierarchy in which the most feminine and feminized sectors lie at the bottom (and the beginning) of the education system with preschool teachers ceding to a masculine (more men) and

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  115 masculinization (skills/attributes of work linked to men) with high school and postsecondary education. Men and women fight to protect their sectors of the teaching hierarchy, which they liken to teaching history. While these efforts can be critiqued, criticized even, as maintaining occupational segregation, the efforts reflect engagement in boundary work. The teachers are actively engaged in a professionalization project through which they desire to maintain the dominant definition of their work as being a history teacher: a purveyor of history knowledge and preparer of citizens. Care work and invisible homework are necessary and complicated evils. Both physically and emotionally extend teachers beyond the professional boundaries they desire for their work. Yet ironically, the care work and invisible homework (perhaps with the exception of required paperwork) also support classroom teaching. If students are hungry, then they cannot learn. So feed them food and then feed them knowledge. If students are not assessed and if classes are not planned they cannot learn. So assess them and prepare lessons for them, then facilitate the assessment and lesson. The feminized quality of the work, then, is embedded in the skills and tasks required (Britton, 2000). Not to acknowledge, remunerate, and/or delegate work to other paid professionals feminizes the work of secondary teachers. As the tasks become incorporated into secondary teaching, this occupational sector runs the risk of not only performing an extensive and intense amount of labor, but also one that is not as highly valued and rewarded. This is evident in the Strong Schools program, specifically. Teachers’ work is presumably valuable to the neoliberal state and the economy. Teachers’ work develops “the capacity for social practice” (Connell, 1995, p. 97). Reid (2003) further elaborates Connell’s insight describing this process as helping students to acquire learning strategies both for themselves as individuals, and to maintain these as a collective property of the society. The capacity for social practice has economic, ideological, and political dimensions. It includes the capacity to labour; capacities for social interaction, involving culture, identity formation and communication; and the “capacity for power,” by which he means the capacity to engage responsibly in political life. (p. 565–566) The teachers in this study knew that. In this chapter and previous datadriven ones, the findings reveal that teachers understand and embrace their power to build civic, economic, and political capacity. Yet so many barriers to fulfilling that capacity emerge with the neoliberal reform of the state, the economy, and education specifically. The way that teachers negotiate extracurricular responsibilities is but one example of how they struggle to educate, to be the professional that Connell and Reid describe. They struggle in a context of uncertainty for the society, economy, and future for which they are educating the youth (Reid 2003, p. 565).

116  Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society CONCLUSIONS The invisible and unacknowledged work of secondary teachers, when illustrated, reveals how gender guides neoliberal reform. As the ideas and logics of neoliberalism’s facets collide with local educational contexts, women and men teachers are there navigating on a field that at times advantages them and at others disadvantages them. Masculinities and femininities as defining features of the profession and the extracurricular work required of professionals are woven into the meanings that emerge for policy, for its practice, and for the profession. Teachers’ boundary work for the professional project illuminates l­ imitations of neoliberal paradigms. No policies can control all that workers do. While not a novel conclusion, it is one that must be reiterated here (and hopefully in other publications). Teachers actively create policies’ meanings on s­ ymbolic, embodied, and emotional levels. Within that meaning and the practices that emerge from it lie important insight for creating reform that is less about patching, less about reforming reform, and more about charting alternative paths to the goal of developing a public education that serves all as equally as possible and, maybe, even speaks to providing equitable educational opportunity (­Fraser, 1997). Alternatively, policies’ incompleteness serves to intensify worker responsibilities, creating false boundaries around what is accomplished toward an end goal such as educating youth. Making such work visible thus serves to extend conceptualizations of teaching and acknowledge the efforts as crucial to improving educational opportunity for all students. REFERENCES Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4(2), 139–158. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braun, A. (2011). “Walking yourself around as a teacher”: Gender and embodiment in student teachers’ working lives. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 32(2), 275–291. Britos, S., O’Donnell, A., Ugalde, V., & Rodrigo, C. (2003). Programas alimentarios en Argentina. [Nutritional Programs in Argentina.] Buenos Aires, Argentina: Centro de Estudios sobre Nutrición Infantil. Britton, D. M. (2000). The epistemology of the gendered organization. Gender and Society, 14(3), 418–434. Chen, M., Vanek, J., Flund, F., & Heintz, J. (2005). Progress of the world’s women: Women, work, and poverty. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Connell, R. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Connell, R. (2005). Change among the gatekeepers: Men, masculinities, and gender equality in the global arena. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), 1801–1825. Connell, R. (2009). Gender in a world perspective, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Dirié, C. & Oiberman, I. (1999). La inserción laboral de los docentes en la Argentina [Teachers’ labor insertions in Argentina]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ministry of Education.

Extracurricular Work in and for an Unequal Society  117 Dussel, I., Tiramonti, G., & Birgin, A. (2000). Decentralization and recentralization in the Argentine educational reform: Reshaping educational policies in the 1990s. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Educational knowledge: Changing relationships between the state, civil society, and the educational community (pp. 155–172). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Fischman, G. (2000). Imagining teachers: Rethinking gender dynamics in teacher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. New York, NY: Routledge. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis. London, England: Macmillan. Haase, M. (2008). “I don’t do the mothering role that lots of female teacher do”: Male teachers, gender, power and social organization. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(6), 597–608. Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Ministerio de Educación, Dirección nacional de políticas socioeducativas. (n.d.) Becas escolares. Buenos Aires: Ministry of Education. Retrieved from http:// portales.educacion.gov.ar/dnps/alumnos/becas-escolares/ Morais de Sá e Silva, M. (2012). Conditional cash transfers: Paying to keep children in school and conquering the world. Three selected case studies. In G. SteinerKhamsi & F. Valdow (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2012: Policy borrowing and lending in education (pp. 309–336). New York, NY: Routledge. Phillips, D. (2004). Toward a theory of policy attraction in education. In G. SteinerKhamsi (Ed.), The global politics of educational borrowing and lending (pp. 54– 68). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Popkewitz, T. (1998). Struggling for the soul: The politics of education and the construction of the teacher. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Reid, A. (2003). Understanding teachers’ work: Is there still a place for labor process theory? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(5), 559–573. Robert, S. A.,  & I. Kovalskys. (2011). Defining the “problem” with school food policy in Argentina. In S. A. Robert, & M. B. Weaver-Hightower (Eds.), School food politics: The complex ecology of hunger and feeding in schools around the world (pp. 94–119). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Robert, S. A. (2013). Incentives, teachers, and gender at work. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 21(31), 1–25. Russell, J. A., J.J.M. Dwyer, L. Macaskill, S. Evers, C. Uetrecht, & C. Dombrow. (2007). Perceptions of child nutrition programs: The voices of children, parents, volunteers, program coordinators, and educators. Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, 2(4), 47–65. Seddon, T., Ozga, J. & Levin, J. S. 2013. Global transitions and teachers’ professionalism. In T. Seddon & J. S. Levin (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2013: Educators, professionalism and politics: Global transitions, national spaces and professional projects (pp. 3–24). New York, NY: Routledge. Standing, G. (1999). Global feminization through flexible labor: A theme revisited. World Development, 27(3), 583–602. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Ed.). (2004). The global politics of educational borrowing and lending. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. UNESCO. (n.d.). Education in Argentina. Paris, France: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

6 Conclusions and New Beginnings Teachers as Policy Protagonists

While all books come out of proposals and scripted plans for their construction, in the process of doing the writing, the thinking, and the analytical work, minds are changed, new directions become evident, different pathways open up while others close down (Ball, ­Maguire, and Braun, 2012, p. 137).

INTRODUCTION Initially, this book’s short title was “Come see how we work.” It is drawn from an interview with a group of teachers at Pampas. (I mention this earlier in the book.) I mention this quote again because the book began as a suggestion to go see teachers’ work. The study participants, teachers whose work I went to see, reiterated this. It took so much prodding for me to see the work that I was being told to examine. This is perhaps because teaching is so strongly framed in symbolic images, in everyday discourse, and even in educational research as what teachers in this study refer to as teaching in front of the classroom. In addition, the global movement to reform national education projects has created a strong frame through which teachers’ work is discussed in terms of accountability, quality, and measured in terms of student achievement. What I saw was the transformation of the occupation from the outside, not in the classroom. Reforms seemed to target teaching work outside the classroom. As outlined in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, teacher education, work arrangements and pay, curricular knowledge, schools, incentives, and extracurricular work were changing. A first conclusion from this study is that examinations of neoliberal reform must be broadened beyond reform discourses. I intended to examine history curriculum reform from teachers’ perspectives. Instead what teachers taught me was that the reform story was circumscribed and needed to be broadened. The study focused on teachers’ gendered policy enactments of a global neoliberal reform agenda in two locations within Argentina. By gendered policy enactments, I refer to the ways that femininities and masculinities shape and are shaped by the meaning that teachers make of policies

Conclusions and New Beginnings  119 impinging on their work. The meaning making is not a static, isolated event; it is transformed into everyday practice in and out of classrooms and schools. At times the enactment process is represented in a decision taken. More often than not, policy enactment is an ongoing process of navigating a strange brew of new and old institutional arrangements and ever-evolving reform of reforms. The enactment mapped out in this book reveals policy instantiations that are personal, that are local, and that are reflective of global transformations of the profession. By centering the policy analysis on teachers’ perspectives, the study reveals the stories of men and women as they navigate changes to the occupation brought about by neoliberal reform. These are real stories about real teachers, some “good” and some not so “good.” All the teachers in this book were qualified; they possessed state-issued credentials. We learn from the teachers that some of those qualifications were considered of better quality than others. At times, women were advantaged in the shifting boundaries of the occupation as we saw the “older” teachers protected from many of the transformations. Still at other times we saw how men were advantaged as they accessed work and big bonuses from incentives with potential long-term professional growth. Still other times, advantage/ disadvantage on the professional terrain was not easily defined by a binary, as in the case of the curricular and school restructuring. Women and men navigated a difficult policy terrain. What we have seen are the ways in which teachers are engaged in boundary work that defines and redefines teaching. The boundary work is revealing of neoliberalism’s impact on teaching as an occupation whose every curve has shifted ever so slightly. At times the shifts open up spaces for a new teacher, different from the middle-class young woman who for generations dominated both symbolic and embodied notions of education professionals. We see that working-class men find teaching attractive. Teaching is a good job. For those who love history, it also offers a means through which to reflect on the trajectory of the nation and of their own lives. A closer look at local instantiations of “the teacher” in the neoliberal context raise questions about the potential potency of a “global teacher” model (Maguire, 2010; Robert, 2014). The ideals of a quality and qualified teacher who can improve education for all students have local cachet and have powerful global drivers in the form of millions of reform dollars. Yet, as we have seen, local interpretation of policies that are meant to cultivate a global teacher often missed their mark completely. Instead, contextual conditions such as economic crises, changes in state services, and historical residue draw out and on the feminine and feminized nature of teaching in ways that obscure plans for achieving discursive ideals. What we have seen potentially reflects Besse’s (1996) restructuring of gender inequality under neoliberalism. In her book, she shows how the Brazilian state consolidated power in a transition moment (after World War I) by modernizing, shifting, really, state control over social relations and

120  Conclusions and New Beginnings playing on pervasive patriarchy in the public and private spheres of social life. She details a process through which gender ideologies and the gender order is seemingly unsettled as new arrangements emerge around women and men’s work in and out of the home. In the present study, teachers’ work appears to be professionalized through the introduction of new educational models and knowledge. Opportunities for more work and increased pay are opened up to men and women. Yet we also see how the hyper-flexibility and openness of work arrangements constrain professional growth and work prospects. We see how occupational changes create potential conflict with family responsibilities. Perhaps what is documented here is a restructuring of patriarchy. The new neoliberal state that emerged at the end of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century engaged in a reconsolidation of control over education and teachers. It did so using the power of gender. What we have seen, however, is that even massive state re-regulatory agendas involve street-level bureaucrats such as teachers. On the ground views such as those offered in this book suggest that teachers resist state projects. Other teachers ignore policy changes because they are of no personal consequence. Still others engage in complex rational decision-making processes to negotiate the meaning and form of the policies in their everyday work lives. Notions of the neoliberal subject are challenged throughout this book explicitly and implicitly. Teachers indeed act rationally, make decisions that serve their individual desires and needs, but they also act collectively, and at other times act to support a model of education and of the teaching profession that contradicts those prefaced by reform. Teachers indeed faced personal and collective professional dilemmas. They did not, however, always respond as idealized and abstract neoliberal subjects. Teachers’ gendered policy enactments often reflect divergent meanings from those of reform if any meanings are located at all. While policy makers and educational researchers attempt to operationalize reform language, teachers are doing so in their everyday work lives, through their policy enactments, as street-level bureaucrats. The meanings ascribed to policy and how policy is “done” by teachers reflects Ball, Maguire, and Braun’s (2012) theorization of policy enactment. I build on that robust theory by showing the ways masculinities and femininities embedded in the ongoing interactive process of occupational gendering tenders those policy readings and acts, adding a local and personal flavor. By also acknowledging the gendered power dynamics surrounding policy and its production, I complicate the theory of policy enactment further. Specifically, questions must be asked of policy process and the forms of teaching work that are the subject of control. By focusing on teachers as the nexus of policy enactment rather than teachers within schools, I hope to have brought attention to the ways that neoliberal reform shifts targets. Schools were not really the focus of Argentina’s changes; teachers and the teaching profession were. If my focus had been limited to schools, if I had not gone to see where teachers work (in and outside of schools, and many schools in some cases), I would not

Conclusions and New Beginnings  121 have been discussing what policy meant and did for schools, for teachers, and for education more generally. I fear that framing policy enactment as something schools “do” glosses over how policy works in and through the persons who make up the organization of a school and personify schools in the process. Finally, teachers indeed acted as Lipsky’s street-level bureaucrats (1980/2010) were expected to. However, I would argue, based on what we have seen in this book, that teachers are much more engaged in policy than street-level bureaucrats. Teachers did not just enact policy that is made by others; they actively pursued policy to feed their students, for example. Still at other times, teachers read and push the boundaries around policies to accommodate their ideas about professional knowledge and prestige when, for example, they pursue further discipline-based certifications instead of accepting the state offer of social studies workshops. Teachers are policy protagonists. It is here that one study ends and the genesis of another begins. REFERENCES Ball, S., Maguire, M. & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy. Policy enactments in secondary schools. London, England: Routledge. Besse, S. K. (1996). Restructuring patriarchy: The modernization of gender inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lipsky, M. (1980/2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service, 30th anniversary expanded ed. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Maguire, M. (2010). Towards a sociology of the global teacher. In M. W. Apple, S. J. Ball, and L. A. Gandin (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of the sociology of education, (pp. 58–68). New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Robert, S. A. (2014). Extending theorisations of the global teacher. Care work, gender, and street-level policies. British Journal of Sociology of Education. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.940035.

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Index

accountability measures 4, 7, 22 – 3, 26, 89, 96, 97, 106, 107, 114, 118 Acker, Joan 10, 19, 20, 28, 53, 71, 91, 97, 110 Acosta, Roberto 42, 103, 106 – 7 Agostini, Elena 40, 84, 109 – 10, 113 – 14 Albertini, Paula 33, 41, 62 – 3, 67 Alvarez, Monica 32, 34, 46 – 7, 57, 63 – 4, 75 – 7, 78, 89, 105, 107 – 8, 110 – 11 Argentina: history of education in 63 – 4; official history textbooks in 1; teachers in 4, 29 – 30; unemployment and poor economy in 38 – 9, 99 Astudillo, Maria Romina 47, 85, 108 – 9 Barral, Carmen 41, 62 – 3, 108, 113 Bolivia, school subsidies in 100 ‘boundary work’: gendered 4 – 5; of teachers 4, 6, 22, 116 Brazil: neoliberal reform in 119 – 20; school subsidies in 100 Buenos Aires see City of Buenos Aires; Province of Buenos Aires Buffalo, NY, education reform in 53 Cabezas, Ana Laura 32 – 4, 78, 80, 81 capitalism 2 – 3 care work/caring 22 – 3, 98, 102, 104, 112 – 15; see also National Student Scholarship Program; Strong Schools (Escuela Fortaleza) program; Universal Snack Program Chile: education reform in 15n1; school vouchers in 2, 15n1 City of Buenos Aires: and curriculum reform 52 – 3, 56 – 7; and

educational reform 8, 12, 55; as global city 8; Strong Schools in 70; teacher education in 31; teacher salaries in 83; teachers in 29; see also Jacaranda College and Career Readiness (US) 49 Common Core (US) 49 communities, support for 80 – 2, 84, 92 – 3, 101 – 2 contract work 40 control, in neoliberal reforms 12, 18, 22 – 3, 26, 28, 98, 120 Corti, Sofia 40, 41, 57, 85 – 7, 112 curriculum reform 12; in City of Buenos Aires 52 – 3, 56 – 7; neoliberal 52; in Province of Buenos Aires 52; social studies vs. history 54 – 5 decentralization 2, 8, 34, 54, 55, 61 decision-making: by men 88 – 9, 91 – 3; regarding incentives 71 – 2, 78 – 9, 88 – 93, 120; role of gender in 7, 21; study of teachers’ 5 – 10; by women 89 – 93 directors, role of 8 – 9, 42, 44, 45, 81, 86 – 7, 99, 100, 105 discipline issues 61 – 3 divisions of labor, gendered 27, 28, 47, 85 Echeverria, Margarita 32 – 3, 37 – 8, 43, 45, 57, 58, 59 – 62, 67, 75 – 6, 79, 90 Educacíon General Básica (EGB) 54, 58, 59 Educacíon Secundaria Básica (ESB) 59 education: decentralization of 2, 8, 34, 54, 55, 61; history of in Argentina 63 – 4; market-based

124  Index concepts in 3, 69, 70; teachers’ perspectives on 4 education reform 2 – 4; in Argentina 14 – 15; in Buenos Aires 1 – 3; in Buffalo, NY 53; in Chile 15n1; effect on teachers 7, 118 – 20; gendered enactment of 20 – 2, 119 – 20; global 7; national 9; neoliberal 3 – 5, 69, 70, 116; objectives of 19; role of teachers in 3, 120 – 1; and school reorganization 52 – 3; and teacher preparation 11 – 12 educational policy/ies: enactment of 17; feminist 21; gendered aspects of 12, 13, 18, 21; making of 3; teachers’ response to 68 – 9 Espina, Alejandra 34, 41, 57, 59, 60, 67, 81, 90, 100 ethnographic present 14 – 15 extracurricular work: and educational reform 13, 118; and the gendered occupational hierarchy 97 – 9; food work 96, 99 – 102; paperwork 97 Federal Education Laws: (1993) 54; (2006) 55 feminist scholarship 98 Freire, Paulo 81 García, Graciela 86 – 7, 112 gendering processes 10 – 11, 20, 28, 53, 71 – 2, 91, 97, 110 gender issues see decision-making; education reform, gendered enactment of; gendering processes; men; neoliberalism, gendered dynamics of; teachers, masculinities vs. femininities of; women globalization 3, 5, 23 Gomez, Isabel 34 – 5, 43, 45, 50, 65, 67, 75 – 6, 79, 90 history textbooks, in Argentina 1 homework, of teachers 46 – 7, 107 – 12, 115 Hora Cátedra 46, 107, 108 Hora Reloj 46, 107 – 8 identity: issues of 5; professional 53, 68; of teachers 12, 68 incentive programs 12 – 13, 70 – 2; Rural Program (La Ruralidad)

70, 72 – 82, 87 – 8, 91 – 3; Strong Schools (Escuela Fortaleza) 70 – 1, 82 – 9, 91 – 3, 112 – 14 incentives 12 – 13; historical use of 92; masculine vs. feminine approach to 12; teachers’ decision-making process regarding 88 – 93 Jacaranda (school) 8; protection from reform at 57; schedule at 107; school culture at 86 – 7, 88 – 9; and the Strong Schools program 70, 82 – 5, 93; teachers at 9, 40 – 2, 56 – 7, 62, 63, 66, 80, 98 Joaquín V. Gonzalez (teacher education) 31 – 3, 35, 65 job fairs, public 44 – 5 job security 12 labor: emotional 22; gendered perceptions of 6; see also extracurricular work; teachers’ work; work and workers labor process theory 3, 11, 18 – 19 lesson plans 105 – 6 literacy 7, 53 Macaya, Mario 35, 36 – 7, 41, 43 – 4, 48, 61, 104 market strategies, and education reform 3, 69, 70 Membrives, Alberto 35, 44, 61, 81, 104 men: as breadwinners 80; decisionmaking process regarding incentives 88 – 9, 91 – 3; participation in the Rural Program 74; teacher preparation of 27; as teachers 20, 30, 49 merit pay 12 – 13 Mexico, school subsidies in 100 Mongolia, teachers in 22 Morales, Lautaro 35, 37 – 9, 41, 43, 45, 58, 50, 64, 65, 67, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81, 88, 100, 104 Morino, Enrique 35, 39, 43, 66, 80 – 1 National Student Scholarship Program 99 – 102 neoliberal reform see education reform neoliberalism 3, 92; defined 5 – 6; in education 18; gendered dynamics of 114, 116

Index  125 Pampas (school) 8; gendered hierarchy of teachers at 57 – 8; in-school snack program at 103 – 5; National Student Scholarship Program at 99; and the Rural Program 73, 80 – 2, 93; schedule at 107 – 8; teachers at 9 – 10, 42, 62, 63, 67, 70, 98 paperwork 105 – 7 patriarchy, restructuring of 120 Paulson, Maria Laura 56 – 7 PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) 52 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 52 Polanco, Esteban 35 – 6, 41, 42, 63 – 4, 65, 80, 81, 99, 106 policy reform see education reform; educational policy/ies policy-making see educational policy/ies poverty 7 – 8, 99 – 100 power dynamics 10 – 11, 120 praxis 107 privatization: of state industry 37, 38, 49, 80; of teacher education 35 – 7 processes of gender work 10 – 11, 20, 28, 53, 71 – 2, 91, 97, 110 “Project 13” 40 Province of Buenos Aires: and curriculum reform 52; education reform in 1 – 3, 5 – 6, 8, 9, 55; education in 34; teachers in 29; see also Pampas provisional teachers 39 – 42 public job fairs 44 – 5 public policy 4 Puerto Rico, teachers in 20 Puiggrós, Adriana 68 Ramazzotti, Josefina 99 Reid, Alan 11, 18 reports 105 – 7 Rubenstein, Ana Estela 32, 47, 66, 108 – 9 Rural Program (La Ruralidad) 70, 72 – 82, 87 – 8, 91 – 3 schools: hard-to-staff 70; restructuring of 52 – 3; see also Jacaranda; Pampas social sciences: and education reform 4; curriculum change in 12, 52 – 3 standardized exams 52, 70

Strong Schools (Escuela Fortaleza) program 70 – 1, 82 – 9, 91 – 3, 112 – 14 students: disciplinary issues of 61 – 3; infantilization of 61, 67; in poverty 7 – 8, 99 – 100 substitute teachers 39, 40 teacher education 2, 11 – 12, 26; additional studies/degrees 90 – 1; in Buenos Aires Province 37 – 9; changes due to reform 26, 30 – 1; and the new curriculum 26, 31; privatization and reformed 29, 35 – 7, 48 – 9; social studies training 58 – 61, 67; traditional 30 – 4; varying quality of 48 teacher participants: Acosta, Roberto 42, 103, 106 – 7; Agostini, Elena 40, 84, 109 – 10, 113 – 14; Albertini, Paula 33, 41, 62 – 3, 67; Alvarez, Monica 32, 34, 46 – 7, 57, 63 – 4, 75 – 7, 78, 89, 105, 107 – 8, 110 – 11; Astudillo, Maria Romina 47, 85, 108 – 9; Barral, Carmen 41, 62 – 3, 108, 113; Cabezas, Ana Laura 32 – 4, 78, 80, 81; Corti, Sofia 40, 41, 57, 85 – 7, 112; Echeverria, Margarita 32 – 3, 37 – 8, 43, 45, 57, 58, 59 – 62, 67, 75 – 6, 79, 90; Espina, Alejandra 34, 41, 57, 59, 60, 67, 81, 90, 100; Gomez, Isabel 34 – 5, 43, 45, 50, 65, 67, 75 – 6, 79, 90; Macaya, Mario 35, 36 – 7, 41, 43 – 4, 48, 61, 104; Membrives, Alberto 35, 44, 61, 81, 104; Polanco, Esteban 35 – 6, 41, 42, 63 – 4, 65, 80, 81, 99, 106; Rubenstein, Ana Estela 32, 47, 66, 108 – 9 teachers: in Argentina 29 – 30; care work by 98, 102, 104, 112 – 15; certification of 2; community involvement of 80 – 2, 84, 92 – 3, 101 – 2; control over 12, 18, 22 – 3, 26, 28, 98, 120; as counselors 70 – 1, 82 – 3, 87, 112 – 14; decision-making process regarding incentives 71 – 2, 78 – 9, 88 – 93, 120; division of duties between schools 40 – 1; and educational policy 21 – 2; entry into the profession 27; gendered decision-making

126  Index processes of 71, 74 – 8, 88 – 93; gendered issues of 4, 27, 50; as generalists vs. specialists 12; and the “global teacher” model 119; home responsibilities of 33; homework required of 46 – 7, 107 – 12, 115; identity and role of 3, 4, 68; isolation of 66; at Jacaranda 9, 40 – 2, 56 – 7, 62, 63, 66, 80, 98; masculinities vs. femininities of 7, 9 – 13, 21, 27, 50, 72, 78, 88, 91, 116, 118, 120; in Mongolia 22; paid vs. unpaid responsibilities of 27; at Pampas 9 – 10, 42, 62, 63, 67, 70, 98; paperwork required of 105 – 7; as policy protagonists 14, 121; professional identity of 53, 68; as public employees 18; Puerto Rican 20; qualified 26 – 7, 47, 49 – 50, 72; quality 26 – 7, 47 – 9, 68, 72; and the reform agenda 2, 3, 68 – 9; salaries of 19 – 20, 73 – 4, 83; selection of career by 34 – 7, 39, 41; social class of 93n1; transportation issues of 78 – 9, 84, 89; as tutors 112 – 14; as workers 3, 7; see also extracurricular work; teachers’ work teachers’ work: boundary work 4 – 6, 22, 116; categorization of 39; control of 11; getting work hours 44 – 5, 67; hours in and out of classroom 45 – 6; importance of 115 – 16; instability and flexibility of 43 – 4; ; see also extracurricular work

teaching: de-professionalism of 53, 55 – 6, 60, 97 – 9, 113, 115; feminization of 98 – 9, 114 – 15; gendered hierarchy of 55 – 6, 66 – 8, 114 – 15; maestras/ maestros vs. profesoras/ profesores 55 – 6, 58 – 9, 68; reform of 2, 120 – 1 tenured teachers 39 tests: international 52; standardized 70 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 52 transportation, as issue in teacher decision-making 78 – 9, 84 unemployment 38, 99 Universal Snack Program 102 – 3 University of Buenos Aires (UBA) 32, 34 – 5 vouchers, in Chile 2, 15n1 women: as caregivers 82, 87, 92; as community activists 81 – 2; decision-making process regarding incentives 89 – 93; issues of dress 77; participation in the Rural Program 74 – 8, 89; safety issues of 74 – 8, 89, 91; teacher preparation of 27; as teachers 19 – 20, 29 – 30, 64 – 5, 67; work/life issues of 45, 48, 85 work and workers, gendered 18; see also extracurricular work; teachers’ work work/life conflict/balance 85, 88, 110 – 12