Abstract

AbstractIn the rhetoric of contemporary federal education reform, public school teachers are often blamed for and championed as solutions to educational problems. Representations of teachers as heroic and blameworthy are an integral component of a neoliberal rationality apparent in education reform since the publication of the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk, as they allow political actors to promote individual solutions to systemic issues that affect student achievement. After briefly exploring the rhetoric of reform, this essay focuses on the ways teachers negotiate the discourses that implicate their profession. To do so, I analyze a corpus of 18 open letters written and published online by current and former public school teachers in protest of policy and/or specific political actors. I argue that authors of these open letters leverage their professional identities to protest and articulate alternatives to seemingly pervasive neoliberal logics inherent in contemporary education reform. In turn, I maintain that analyzing vernacular exchanges, such as teachers’ protest discourse, is imperative to understanding the material consequences of education policy as well as the full discursive space of policymaking.

Journal
Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published
2019-03-01
DOI
10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.1.0059
Open Access
Closed
Topics

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Cites in this index (6)

  1. Rhetoric & Public Affairs
  2. Rhetoric & Public Affairs
  3. Rhetoric & Public Affairs
  4. Rhetoric & Public Affairs
  5. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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  1. College Composition and Communication
Also cites 15 works outside this index ↓
  1. and Henry Giroux, "Neoliberalism's War against Teachers in Dark Times," Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodolo…
  2. 4. Shawn Batt, “Keeping Company in Controversy: Education Reform, Spheres of Argument, and Ethical Criticism,…
  3. 6. For scholarship focused on the representation of teachers, see Goldstein and Beutel, “Soldier of Democracy…
  4. 7. Robert Asen, Deb Gurke, Ryan Solomon, Pamela Conners, and Elsa Gumm, “‘The Research Says’: Definitions and…
  5. Chris Lubienski, "Redefining 'Public' Education: Charter Schools, Common Schools, and the Rhetoric of Reform,…
  6. 24. Alison Prentice and Marjorie R. Theobald, Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teac…
  7. 26. Kathleen Edgar Kendall, “Education as the ‘Balance Wheel for the Social Machinery’: Horace Mann’s Argumen…
  8. 35. Lee W. Anderson, Congress and the Classroom: From the Cold War to “No Child Left Behind” (University Park…
  9. and Janice Peck, "(Neo)Liberalism, Popular Media, and the Political Struggle for the Future of US Public Educ…
  10. 45. Rebecca A. Kuehl, “The Rhetorical Presidency and ‘Accountability’ in Education Reform: Comparing the Pres…
  11. 46. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 17.
  12. 49. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theo…
  13. 53. No Child Left Behind is an act of Congress passed in 2001 that asserted “four basic premises: stronger ac…
  14. 70. Tatiana Suspitsyna, “Accountability in American Education as a Rhetoric and a Technology of Governmentali…
  15. 77. Robert Asen, “Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13 (2010): 127.
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