James Christopher Head won the 2019 Distinguished Dissertation in Qualitative Inquiry award for his multi-contextual narrative research focused on teachers’ navigation of education policy enactment.
Aimed at holding teachers individually accountable for their students’ “growth” on test scores, the U.S. government’s Race to the Top program inspired an unprecedented wave of education reforms across the nation (Harris & Herrington, 2015). These programs instituted new forms of audit technologies aimed at orienting teachers’ priorities toward the calculations produced by students, rather than towards students’ holistic growth and well-being. Ushering in the era of individualized consequential accountability in education policy (Head, 2019), these programs signify an ideological rupture for teachers in that their long-shared sense of interpersonal accountability is institutionally re-directed – and reinforced with consequences – toward calculative accountability. One of the earliest versions of these programs was implemented in New York City during the 2013-2014 school year, which set the stage for an incredibly tumultuous period for a variety of stakeholders implicated in and impacted by the historic and dramatic shift (Hernández & Baker, 2013, April 19; Harris & Fessenden, 2015, May 20; Harris, 2015 August 12). Because educators offer valuable perspectives about the ecological complexities of policy enactment (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012), a “bottom-up approach” to research can illuminate institutional changes as they were lived (see McLaughlin & Talbert, 1990, p. 7) by the teachers who were centrally positioned as both the “key levers” and targets of NYC’s accountability measures (NYC Department of Education, 2012, p. 5). By foregrounding the relational, experiential, day to day narratives of those who were the “subject of policy” to vivify both the policies in practice and the embodied subjectivities of those living with the policies (see Bansel, 2015), I first sought to explore how teachers made sense of, experienced and adapted to the institutional changes stemming from the newly implemented policy. To understand how teachers interpreted and constructed meaning in their lives during policy enactment in a way that honored the depth and complexity of their experiential accounts, I devised a multi-contextual program of analysis that iteratively wove multiple modes of narrative inquiry in a complementary fashion. In The Narration of Conflicting Accountabilities in the Era of High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation, which was awarded the distinction of Distinguished Dissertation in Qualitative Inquiry for 2019 by Div. 5 of the American Psychological Association, I articulate how I constructed an analytic program aimed at illuminating multiple levels of narrated experience as they related to one another, and in so doing, offer a framework for researchers interested in exploring the multi-contextual nature of narration.
In the research, I conducted four distinct narrative studies. In the first, taking a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2011), I examined prevalent patterns in three distinct communities of teachers’ experiential accounts during the enactment of the new accountability policy. Then, building from the teachers’ juxtaposition of their experiential accounts with contemporary news reports, I took a dynamic narrative inquiry approach (Daiute, 2014), which allowed me to situate their evaluative narratives in relation to mediatized narrative constructions from the most prominent periodicals in the area, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (Bercovici, 2013). Then, building from the teachers’ explicit narration of their own moral conflicts, I conducted a Listening Guide analysis (see Gilligan, et al., 2003) to examine the multivocal quality of their ideological dilemmas. Lastly, to explore how the findings from the first three analyses functioned in the totality of a life story, I conducted a life history analysis of one exemplary teacher. Collectively, these analyses illustrated how multiple experiential contexts functioned alongside one another in the teachers’ experiential accounts, and in so doing, enlivened analytic abstractions while accentuating the multi-contextual quality of their narrative constructions.
The findings from these complementary analyses demonstrate how historical shifts in education policy created dilemmatic conditions for teachers, which engendered sociohistorical, interpersonal, personal and intrapsychic conflicts for those most directly targeted by the newly introduced programs. In the foundational study of my dissertation, I found that the enactment of the new policies engendered assaultive social organizational processes in schools, which facilitated the teachers’ sense that they were engaged in the violation of their relational morality (Head, 2019). In a complementary voice-based analysis, I found that this violation was not only an affront to their ideological position but also an embodied assault that struck at the core of their being. This assault was frequently narrated as the primary reason why most of these teachers felt compelled to leave their jobs. Nearly all of these teachers have since made their exit from their positions and/or the profession, and accordingly, this research affirms and contextualizes survey data regarding the attritional ideation of those navigating the introduction of this evaluation program (United Federation of Teachers Research Department, 2014) and the rates of their actual attrition (United Federation of Teachers Research Department, 2015). While the teachers navigated institutional conditions that facilitated the violation of their sense of relational morality, the teachers’ expression of that value-stance was absent in the most prominent news media outlets of their time (Head & Pryiomka, 2019). Such an omission is congruent with the historical pattern in which noneducators’ discursive constructions have dominated the policy paradigms that have coordinated the lives of teachers (Mehta, 2013; Goldstein, 2014). The assault, domination and moral injuries that were prevalent throughout the teachers’ narratives were vivified in the contours of one exemplary teachers’ life history, which illuminated dynamic resonances between her more contemporary narration of policy enactment and previous traumatic experiences. Collectively, these analyses illustrate how the enactment of individualized consequential accountability is a multilayered process entangled in sociohistorical, sociopolitical, existential, interpersonal, moral and embodied spheres of meaning-construction. This research, thus, expands upon dominant contemporary conceptions of education reform by calling attention to the psychological consequences of teachers navigating individualized consequential accountability policies.
References
Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactment insecondary schools. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bansel, P. (2015). The subject of policy. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 5–20.
Bercovici, J. (2013). Despite digital gains, newspaper circulation backslides. Forbes, April 30.
Charmaz, K. (2011). A constructivist grounded theory analysis of losing and regaining a valued self. In F. J. Wertz, K. Charmaz, L. M. McMullen, R. Josselson, R. Anderson, & E. McSpadden (Eds.), Five ways of doing qualitative analysis (pp. 165–204). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Daiute, C. (2014). Narrative inquiry: Dynamic narrating in life and research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gilligan, C. S., Spencer, R. R., Weinberg, M.K., & Bertsch, T. (2003). On the listening guide: A voice centered relational method. In P. Camic, J. Rhodes, L. Yardsley (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design, 157-172. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Goldstein, D. 2014. The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday.
Harris, E.A. (2015, August 12) “20% of New York State students opted out of standardized this Year.” The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/ nyregion/new-york-state-students-standardized-tests.html
Harris, E.A., & Fessenden, F. (2015, May 20). “‘Opt out’ becomes anti-test rallying cry in New York State.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/nyregion/opt-out-movement-against-common-core-testing-grows-in-new-york-state.html?_r=0.
Head, J. C. (2019). From the bottom-up: New York City teacher evaluation and the narration of mediated institutional assault. Critical Studies in Education, 60, 37-54.1-18.
Head, J. C., & Pryiomka, K. (2019). Accounting for mediatization in the era of individualized consequential accountability. Journal of Education Policy, 1-20.
Hernández, J.C., & Baker, A. (2013, April 19). “A tough new test spurs protest and tears.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/education/ common-core-testing-spurs-outrage-and-protest-among-parents.html.
McLaughlin, M.W., & Talbert, J.E. (1990). The contexts in question: The secondary school workplace. In M.W. McLaughlin, J.E. Talbert, & N. Bascia (Eds.), The contexts of teaching in secondary schools: Teachers' realities (pp. 1–16). New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
Mehta, J. (2013). The allure of order. New York: Oxford University Press.
NYC Department of Education. (2012). Teacher effectiveness program 2012–2013 handbook. Office of Teacher Effectiveness, Division of Talent, Labor and Innovation. Retrieved from: https://www.uft.org/files/attachments/tep-handbook.pdf
United Federation of Teachers Research Department (2014). UFT Annual Teacher Survey: Analysis of Results. Retrieved from: www.uft.org/files/attachments/annual-teacher-survey-2014.pdf.
United Federation of Teachers Research Department (2015). Attrition Sneaks Upward as Teachers Show Signs of Restlessness. Retrieved from www.uft.org/files/attachments/attrition-report-dec-2015.pdf.
