In 2020 I conducted interviews with high school English teachers from across the Upper Cumberland with the intention of creating a portrait, so to speak, of what it was like to teach during the pandemic. I interviewed a small sample of teachers about their experiences during the Spring 2020 closure and the return that Fall. I wanted to capture the unique experience of that time and situation.
During analysis I used several approaches including inductive analysis, narrative analysis, and poetic transcription. The bulk of my analysis, however, used a postructural approach to examine teacher interviews for discourses related to accountability and learning.
Theoretical Framework
Language is a method by which power relations are created, constituted, perpetuated, and reinforced (Foucault, 1978). Power itself is not something owned, but rather enabled through acceptance of a discourse as true and self-evident:
…[power] is never appropriated in the way that wealth or a commodity can be appropriated. Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. (p. 29)
Luke (1995) discussed the implications of Foucault’s philosophies on discourse analysis, saying that language is not a passive or neutral means for describing but rather a method to “effectively construct, regulate and control knowledge, social relations and institutions” (p. 1). Therefore, to analyze the use of language and discourses therein represented is a method by which to deconstruct and expose tactics used to facilitate power, and thereby reject them. This study utilized discourse analysis to identify and examine deficit discourses in teacher speech, trace the discourses, and expose the power dynamics which they reinforced.
Participant Descriptions
Participants were four rural public high school English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, Ms. Candice, Mr. Matthews, Mr. King, and Mrs. Stonecipher (all names are pseudonyms), who taught in Tennessee schools from spring to fall 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic. Participants were between the ages of 26 and 42, two male and two female, all White, with between 3 and 13 years professional teaching experience. Participants represented four rural schools from three districts in Tennessee: Maron County, Blue Lake County, and Holden County (all names are pseudonyms), which were all within a forty-five minute drive to a micropolis.
Ms. Candice, 42, had been teaching at the same school in Blue Lake County for 11 years. She had two Master’s degrees, one in English and one in Education, and was working on her PhD. Previously an A.P. English teacher, she was moved to Freshman English after the principal’s daughter failed her class the year before. A visibly strong and outspoken person, Ms. Candice spoke highly of her local school while expressing moderate frustration for her district and outright disapproval for state leadership. All of Ms. Candice’s classes had a mix of virtual and in-person students.
Mr. Matthews was a 30-year-old man with 6 years teaching experience, all at the same school in Maron County. His Bachelor’s degree was in English, and he had a Master’s in creative writing. The majority of his students were in-person, but he had several students who were virtual for various periods of time during the Fall semester because of exposure or potential exposure to COVID-19. Mr. Matthews focused on communication and the value of teacher autonomy.
Mr. King, 37, had 13 years experience in education and was in his fifth year at his school in Maron county at the time of data collection. Mr. King was very familiar with various computer technologies and, in addition to teaching multiple classes, some totally in-person and some totally virtual, was also Tech-support for other teachers in his school. His Bachelor’s was in Education, and he had a Master’s in German. Mr. King spoke mostly of teacher-preparedness and relevant teacher training.
Mrs. Stonecipher, 26, was in her third year of teaching with 2 years experience in Holden County where she taught during data collection. She taught Freshman English Honors and regular classes. She was also an assistant basketball coach for her county. She talked much of standards and expectations for teachers and students, and she caught her own speech often, backstepping if she felt that what she was saying seemed too negative or pessimistic.
Quick participant overview:
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Mr. Mathews described the circumstances from spring to fall 2020 at his school, which were common across Tennessee:
In the spring when Covid first became a concern . . . Maron County schools canceled . . . first, just the day before Spring Break. Following Spring Break they canceled it for another month, and then following that they completely canceled it for the rest of the semester. And that was disorienting because we left school on . . . that Thursday before Spring Break, not realizing that we were not going to return to school for the rest of the semester, or not even realizing that we weren’t going to return to school the next day. They sent out an email and then an all-call at, like . . . 5 or 6 in the afternoon, telling us that school was canceled until the end of Spring Break and then they did the same thing, you know, several times until it was over. And in the midst of that . . . for a while we were told, like, don’t do any instruction online because we as a district have to figure out how we’re going to do this in a way that doesn’t leave people out and in a way that addresses all of the stuff that we need to address, like IEPs and stuff like that. And, eventually, um, I guess that, I’m not sure exactly if that became less of a concern, because we weren’t really instructed on that much differently except to be told, like, you can reach out to your students and give them optional assignments to do for the rest of the semester, or students can just elect to take their current grade and have that be their final grade . . . once they had decided that we weren’t going to return that semester. (Transcript 2, L 2–22)
In light of these circumstances, participants of this study (from four different schools) shared a common perception that many of their students and members of the school community developed the impression that virtual instruction meant students would simply be passed and receive their credits, without regard to their attendance or completion of assignments. Mrs. Stonecipher described this when she said, “I think virtual was a big fear for a lot of people [going into the fall] and that mindset set by the Spring semester saying, well you can still not do anything and pass on to the next grade. It’s that I’ve had a lot of kids say, well it doesn’t matter if I do anything they’re just gonna give me a grade and go on” (Transcript 4, L 175–178).
Mr. King reflected on these circumstances and concerns as well:
Nobody had any clue what to do with instruction [in the spring] and . . . the County kind of scrambled; they ended up putting together this thing called MCSatHome which was a collection of, really, just worksheets that students could come to school and pick up or they could do on their computers and send them back and . . . we would take a grade if it would improve their grade, we would not if it didn’t. Or if you didn’t want to do it, fine you’re grade stays the same—all that kind of stuff. Which was, you know, in hindsight, probably the best that the County could manage. My fear is that it may have given parents a somewhat confused idea of what virtual school looks like because that’s not what virtual school looks like this year. (Transcript 3, L 118–133)
Some teachers believed that the accommodations made for grades in the Spring semester had lowered expectations and thereby harmed student learning. This was described by Mrs. Stonecipher who assumed that student learning was motivated by grades, and if grades did not exist as an extrinsic reward then students would not be motivated to learn classroom content:
The way that the grading is handled can be a negative factor a lot for students because if they see that they’re putting forth more effort than then, really, what other kids are doing but they’re still getting the same grade. . . . That grading scale is a thing that could be seen as a negative, so they don’t want to do more than what they have to. (Transcript 4, L 8–25)
It was common for educators to assume that grades motivated student learning. Dangerously coupled with this assumption was the belief that grades were accurate measures thereof. This represented a powerful discourse in rural schools that students with high grades are good learners while those with low grades don’t like learning:
You have students who are in the regular class who probably really, really hate English and probably aren’t really strong readers. They don’t love reading, they don’t like learning, they feel like it’s, all it is is constrictive, if that makes sense. While my Honors kids, the majority of them, they do like reading and they do like learning; they like going across different cultures and looking at different types of stories that they can go off of, or they can apply to their lives. And again I know that kind of sounds nerdy saying that, but that does, I have had kids that said that they really enjoy different stories. Like, we started The Odyssey today and mythological background and all of that stuff with Honors and they liked it. They really liked it. Regular, not so much” (L 100–108).
This conceptualization of nonlearners (“they don’t love reading, they don’t like learning”) and Mrs. Stonecipher’s distinction between her Honors and regular courses demonstrated how the structure of grades in schools enforced a categorization of what is and what is not learning. Only the knowledge offered by the institution was valued (and measured and deemed failure or not by the assignment of scores), and the experiences and knowledges students have outside of the classroom were dismissed and considered irrelevant. Ms. Candice talked about how many of her students from the Spring semester chose to prioritize work over education when campuses closed:
I’ve always been a level 5 teacher, but those kids chose to not come to classes and not work on their stuff; they went to work because the pandemic shut so many people down. So I had all these juniors and seniors who were over the age of 17, and they just started working full time during the pandemic rather than coming to classes. . . . But you can’t blame them . . . they’re looking at money, they’re looking at paying for college and this that and the other—they’re not looking at the long-term effects. So they simply went to work rather than come to class. . . . I was calling and pleading and begging and, you know, all kinds of stuff like, look you’re losing thousands of dollars by not finishing this course and not getting your AP placement. But they went to work because parents needed the money and they needed money and everybody needed money. (Transcript 1, L 25–37)
She continued,
I get really irritated with the job thing because . . . I’m a single mom and everything my kids have I pay for myself, and I’ve not let either of them work while they’re in school. But they also don’t have cars. They don’t have new iPhones. They don’t have . . . there’s tons of things they don’t have. But it’s okay because they have an education. (Transcript 1, L 41–44)
Ms. Candice believed that an education would provide access to more money and mobility for her students and for herself, but she assumed that students who prioritized immediate jobs over school assignments would never move forward:
The problem is [students] don’t have a lot of support from family. . . . They would work overtime . . . rather than continuing their education and moving forward in a degree that’s going to pay them more. So if you have a kid who is working at minimum wage and then they’re doing online classes, that minimum wage pays way more than those online classes, and they’re going to stick with that minimum wage. They would never move forward. (Transcript 1, L 136–141)
Mr. King had a much more positive outlook on virtual instruction, but his assumptions were, like Ms. Candice’s, informed by the discourse that the purpose of public education is to prepare students for the workforce:
Many of my kids that I have virtual, they are learning skills that they could not get in the classroom. . . . They’re having to learn self-efficacy. . . they’re having to become masters of their own learning. The ownership is, you know, by necessity, higher than it would be in a classroom. So, you know, I think for a certain subset of kids virtual is awesome. . . . They’re learning how to manage their own time, they’re learning how to prioritize their learning, how to . . . do the types of things that they will have to know how to do in college, in the workplace, in all that kind of stuff. But they also have to be the type of students who are going to do well academically, and some kids struggle with that. So it’s not—virtual is not a one-size fits-all sort of thing. (Transcript 3, L 377–385)
The discourse that the purpose of education is to produce employable workers informs teacher speech about who is learning and who is not. At the school level, students are held accountable as workers by teachers through the use of grades and standardized tests in the same way that teachers are held accountable to administrators through scores and observations. Students who receive high grades are deemed successful and rewarded with meritorious praise while those who receive low grades are deemed failures. Likewise, teacher scores are frequently used to determine salary or bonuses. In this way, the school structure establishes a hierarchy of accountability in which students report to teachers, teachers report to administrators, administrators report to the county, and the county reports to the state. Mrs. Stonecipher illustrated the hierarchy of accountability she felt was a part of her school culture and how grades were interwoven into the structure:
I was very hesitant [at the beginning of the Fall semester] about how our grading scale was going to be handled, um, and frustrated because I, again, we hold our kids up, or us as teachers hold our kids to a certain standard and we are held up to a certain standard by our administrators. (Transcript 4, L 171–173)
The hierarchy of accountability, however, according to Mr. Matthews, often served to empower those at the top while ignoring those at the bottom:
The public face of the district has been one of unity and solidarity, like, Oh we’re all in this Covid season together, you know, we’re all working hard to make to make sure students are safe and make sure that we figure out logistical hurdles and stuff. But, in reality . . . there’s been quite a bit of discontent among teachers, partially because . . . the district wasn’t communicating well with teachers. And another part of that [discontentment] is because . . . there’s more work involved this semester. . . . And I think that because the district has this outward facing view of, like, we’re all in this together, there’s not been a forum for teachers to express their concerns or their, like, you know, workplace struggles. And I think that’s been mostly intentional. Like, I don’t think that our district has cared too much what teachers have to say. I think the expectation was . . . teachers will get more work, but we’re still going to be working together, right? Teachers shouldn’t complain because we’re all in the same boat. And I think it’s been kind of a disingenuous stance by our district leadership. You know, they created a team in the middle of the summer to try to start to figure out what should our reopening plan be, and that team didn’t involve any teachers. It was, like, they had a couple of principals and then some, like, business leaders in the community and stuff like that, but teachers were left almost entirely out of the loop. There was, like, a focus group of teachers that they communicated with, but no teachers had any real agency within the decision-making process of this, and, in fact . . . when teachers were kind of voicing concerns or, like, you know, maybe saying that they were worried about, like, safety or things like that, there was a lot of public backlash from people who viewed teachers as just kind of complaining, and, you know, they should learn to be just like all the other essential workers and just go to work because this is what we need to do to have our society function. And stuff like that. And I don’t think teachers wanted not to have to teach; I think teachers wanted to have a voice and be heard and have some semblance of control over what the decisions the district was making were, and I don’t think we were ever extended that. . . . There were several points at which our jobs were kind of implicitly threatened. You’re probably aware that in Tennessee teachers aren’t allowed to go on strike, for example. And our union . . . sent an email kind of at the height of, like, before they had announced the reopening plan and when teachers were kind of getting, you know, really disgruntled with the fact that they were being left out of stuff, they sent us an email that was, really weird, but basically all the different ways that Maron County Schools could fire you. You know, and some of it being kind of vague like . . . there were some that were, like, you know, being disruptive in the community, or something like that, you know—stuff that made it unclear, like, could you go to a protest about education or things like that. . . . And then also over the summer . . . before we even knew what the reopening plan was, they sent an email asking teachers, like, are any of you guys going to resign if we just reopened as normal? And another option was you could take a semester Leave without pay and without actually guaranteeing your job back at the end, and stuff like that. . . . It felt like the district was kind of browbeating teachers into just going along with business as usual, and just let the district leadership figure this out, and you guys just kind of fall into line when we announce our plan. And I think it basically comes down to the dynamic described in that article, which is that there’s the expectation that teachers will be okay with any sort of increase in work or whatever because we’re all working for a good cause. Because we’re working for a good cause and we’re all working for the same goals, you should put forth a happy, compliant face. (Transcript 2, L 263– 318)
Mr. Mathews said the lack of communication was characteristic not only of the spring and summer, but also well into the Fall semester:
I would say a really consistent feature of, like, the entire [pandemic teaching experience] is a lack of transparency. Not so much at the building level—our principles and stuff have been, you know, really, really easy to work with and they’ve been gracious, and we’ve kind of, you know, had some kind of, like, we’re all working through this together thing. But the district itself—district leadership, like our Superintendent and stuff—there’s been a real lack of communication as to what their decision-making process is, or even what their decisions are. Like I said, before we got closed in the spring we left assuming we were going to come back the next day, and they didn’t tell us, you know. And presumably they knew, you know, hours before they made the announcement that we weren’t going to be coming to school the next day. We weren’t told. And I know a lot of teachers, myself included, have been pretty, pretty upset about . . . just the lack of transparency with how are you arriving at decisions and when. Another thing is we have been told that there are tiers of caution. They have, you know, green being like a normal school day, yellow being kind of what we’re in right now where we have the safety precautions, and then red being when you close down a school. But they didn’t give us benchmarks for what those things, like, what would indicate how you move from one of those levels to another. So, like, there’s no official number on how many Covid cases or what percentage of quarantined students or whatever you have to have to close your school down. And that’s happened a couple of times, but it’s, there’s still not, like, if 20% of your students have been quarantined because of exposure to Covid then your school goes into the red. . . . Like, there’s been no communication with that even though someone is making decisions based on some criteria, we’ve just not been told. (Transcript 2, L 169–185)
Mr. King echoed the theme of communication:
Now we did get into a situation . . . about a month ago, I guess we went, quote-unquote, red, which means because of quarantines or cases or missing—we don’t know exactly why, they won’t tell us—but because of some metric we went . . . completely virtual for two weeks. (Transcript 3, L 25–28)
And this lack of communication extended into classrooms when teachers were not informed about their potential exposure to the Coronavirus:
It’s not clearly communicated to us why students are quarantined. Sometimes they’re quarantined because they themselves have tested positive, sometimes they are quarantined because their parents have, or they’ve been in contact with somebody who has; but I feel like the district is not being transparent with that. And they’re not being transparent in ways that have allowed them to kind of fudge things. . . . If you have 20 or 30 students in [a classroom] . . . you’re pretty close to students the whole time even if you don’t . . . talk one-on-one with them in a particular day. But if a student tests positive for Covid the contact tracing is only for the immediate people that sit around them in a class rather than communicating it to the whole cluster, or even to the teacher themselves. One of my students said that she had tested positive for Covid and she . . . was actually in the hospital, . . . but I was never told that. I was just told she was quarantined. . . . So, like, there’s not a lot of communication as to what your risks have been at school. And they say that some of this is because of HIPAA concerns, you know, like you’re not really supposed to share medical information about people without their consent and stuff like that, but I—I don’t know, I guess it feels significant. Like, it feels like information I should know if one of my students had Covid or not, and whether I should get tested; but that’s never been information I’ve been given. And I’m not sure if that’s an oversight. . . . I feel really out of the loop as far as, like, you know, how exposed have I been in the classroom. (Transcript 2, L 666–690)
Ms. Candice described the hierarchical structure as a pyramid scheme and elaborated on the obscurity of communication and accountability from state down to employee:
At my school I’m pretty lucky. . . . My principal, she’s been at this for two years and her daughter is a senior here . . . so she’s very good about relating information and communicating with teachers. County wide we get a nonchalant I dunno like everybody else. And then it just gets worse as we make it up the state. (Transcript 1, L 69–72)
I’m so tired of them, like, passing the buck. So you have someone at a state level who’s designed a program and then they pass it down to a state level teacher who passes it down to the district who passes it down to a district teacher who—and at that point you cannot complain because that person has no control over anything. . . . It’s almost like a pyramid scheme, you know, they tell you something and you’re supposed to be on board and smile and blah blah blah because that’s your peer that’s telling you it needs to be done. . . . I’m the English department head, and they want me to pass things down and I’m like, um, no, but here’s when our PLC meeting is—you’re welcome to come and tell them this, because it’s stupid and I’m not going to ask my teachers to do it. It’s just not gonna happen. I mean how many forms do I have to put my name on before you’re happy? (Transcript 1, L 311–323)
In the same vein as Ms. Candice’s pyramid scheme characterization, Mr. Matthews acknowledged that the chain of command continued from the state to the national level and suggested that the decisions of local Tennessee school districts were informed by a national conservative discourse that the Coronavirus pandemic was a disruption and a distraction, again, because capitalism is the lifeblood of American society, and it is the responsibility of individuals to submit to a mutually beneficial hierarchy of accountability. Anything else is disruptive and harmful to the individual and to the collective society. Political rhetoric surrounding the pandemic prioritized in-person education as a return to normal and underemphasized safety precautions:
The Secretary of Education [Betsy DeVos] and Donald Trump—in I guess it was late July or something— threatened to withhold federal funds from districts that didn’t open in person. And of course it was unclear whether or not they actually could do that . . . but I think that put a lot of public pressure on districts to have some sort of students-going-in-person option in reopening. I have also heard the same thing from Bill Lee. The Governor has really put an emphasis on in-person learning as the most important learning . . . and, I mean, that’s not really a controversial statement in other times, you know . . . but it became such a politically fraught idea because of all the safety concerns with Covid, and there was a sort of—it felt like a pipeline of an idea—of school has to open in-person. And that kind of sounded like it came from the federal level and then, like, at the state level it kind of was echoed; and then, you know, I think that influenced our district’s reopening policy. . . . The practice of our school district has kind of mirrored the practice of Tennessee as a whole which is sort of to put in place bare bones safety procedures and then let the rest be kind of up to local, individual control or individual choice. . . . So yeah, I personally wish that our district would have maybe invested a bit more in figuring out how to safely reopen, but I think that became such a politically contentious thing over the spring and summer that the district either didn’t want to get embroiled in it or was kind of implicitly taking a side by not being really hardline about safety precautions. (Transcript 2, L 326–356)
While the hierarchy was being enforced and teachers were being held accountable to vague decisions made by those above them, the same thing was happening to students as a result of being held accountable to teachers. Mrs. Stonecipher expressed fear of being “held accountable” for student performance levels: “I was so afraid that my kids were still going to be, their EOCs were still going to count, I was still going to be held accountable for something that I had no control over” (L 413–415). Mrs. Stonecipher understood that she would be graded on her students’ performance because the hierarchy of accountability was a normal, self-evident, unchallenged discourse within the school culture. Mrs. Stonecipher said, “I feel like a lot of the time teachers are pushed so hard for these certain standards, for standards that we feel like, okay we have to have them reach this or it’s going to look bad on us” (L 293–295). She talked about how she had modified expectations for her classroom in light of the pandemic because of perceived learning loss:
I feel like I started off teaching eighth grade and I’ve had to kind of build up and set my expectations a little bit higher so they don’t technically reach the expectation but they reach the level that I need them to be at by the beginning of the year. It’s a little harsh. Like, I had over half of my regular kids failing English by midterm. (Transcript 4, L 246–250)
Her reasoning for being so hard on students echoed elements of accountability and being an equal member of a team, and she even caught herself when she felt she was stepping outside the discourse that workers should remain positive:
We’re not any different than a basketball team. We all have certain jobs, we have to work together to get to our ultimate goal, but sometimes we really have negativity. I’ve been negative before, I mean I can say that. I mean . . . when they took away the summer reading list I threw an absolute fit. I pouted for days. But, I mean, I guess it’s because we don’t really get a lot of, you know, positive feedback. And, again, I’m not trying to be negative, I know that sounds negative, but, I mean, every once in a while it would be nice to have a little bit of—hey, you’re working hard, you’re doing a good job. (Transcript 4, L 348–354)
Mr. King challenged the learning loss narrative from an academic standpoint:
My personal stance is: yeah, there’s some [learning loss]. I’m not sure if it’s significantly higher than it would have been had we ended in May, there’s always that summer learning loss, you know. . . . My English II students look pretty much like English II students do whenever I have them; I don’t notice any major significant gaps. I did . . . three or four data collection instruments at the beginning of the semester just to test this out, you know. If anything, it trended a little high. (Transcript 3, L 143–149)
He continued, however, by speculating about a socio-emotional or school culture learning loss:
That said, I do think there was some learning loss, you know, it’s just, how do you capture it? If nothing else there was a loss of school—it took a little bit to get these kids back to the mindset of I’m going to school, I’m doing school, you know? They spent all these months just sitting at home doing whatever they wanted to do, so coming back to school, you know, there was a very blasé kind of . . . uninterested attitude towards school. So I would lump that in, you know, I don’t know what you want to call that—social emotional learning loss, like, whatever, you know, but whatever you want to call it, I would say that factors in to the, quote-unquote, learning loss as well. (Transcript 3, L 149–157)
Just as teachers’ problems with the hierarchy have been reflected upon here, Mr. Matthews ruminated on the experiences of his students and imagined they felt out-of-the-loop and ignored by the way things were handled during the Fall semester:
I think part of this is messaging. Like, I don’t know that our school has been unified in the message that, like, you as a student when you’re quarantined are responsible for keeping up with class work. That was an expectation that teachers were told that students have, and that is something we communicated to students, but based on what my students have done in quarantine . . . some students have been, like, daily in contact with me, daily doing assignments, while other students don’t ever respond to any sort of communication and then come back and say, like, I didn’t know I was supposed to do all this stuff. And I don’t think that there was ever, like, any sort of meeting where the students were told you need to do stuff when you’re quarantined, but we as teachers have communicated that to individual students. For example, I just had one student who was quarantined who came back, like, the week before Fall Break and I had been in contact with him over email and he had responded once and then he came back and I said, like, well you didn’t do any of these assignments, and he said, Oh yeah I, you know, doing stuff online I don’t really like doing that so I was just going to wait till I got back to make it all up. But then, like I said, I’ve had other students who were very, um, uh, persistent and, and you know, really collected with, like, you know, being sure to keep up with assignments on a daily basis3. And I would say it basically falls along the lines of: are these students who are likely to take initiative on their assignments regardless of their context? And so the students who would be successful independently doing work in a classroom are the ones who are going to be successful online for me. And then the students who would have needed, like, that kind of additional push, like, like, a teacher actually there walking them through stuff—a lot of times they are the ones who I’m not getting a lot of contact with, and that honestly makes sense. I mean, you know, if you’re a student that, you know, for whatever reason lacks the, the, the motivation or the initiative to do work without somebody, you know, kind of helping you or tutoring you or something like that, I don’t think that the way that we have quarantine set up in which you suddenly disappear from school for two weeks is going to be best for their educational interests. (Transcript 2, L 114–139)
Discussion
The excerpts from teacher interviews above represented both examples of and challenges to discourses normalized in rural public high schools. At the national level, capitalism structures American life and is enforced through a punitive system which has power to ascribe merit and prescribe values. In order to maintain power through the rhetoric of law and order, the American workforce incorporates a hierarchy of accountability, and good workers are expected to mechanically fulfill their role without disruption. As the Coronavirus pandemic brought disruption to the capitalistic American structure, it has afforded all of us the opportunity to reevaluate the structures we previously took as self-evident.
In the field of education, the disruption was often talked about in regard to grading structures (like class scores, test scores, and attendance), and teachers reflected on the effects that the “stop-the-bleeding” (Transcript 3, L 194) approach from the Spring semester had on their students. Some teachers felt that the disruption to grades and the inadequate substitution afforded by virtual attendance had incurred a profound learning loss, which was echoed by (or echoed from) conservative political rhetoric. Even teachers who considered any academic loss to be minimal referred to a loss of the socialization that the school provides. Regardless of their stance on learning loss, all participants took it to be self-evident that teachers and students (and all workers) were to be held accountable by an immediate superior. Some teachers expressed resistance to holding students accountable for things beyond their control, but they knew that they would still be held accountable by their superior in the hierarchy.
As described by participants, this hierarchy obscures communication and distributes information on a need-to-know basis, as determined by those in power (i.e. those with money or social capital). Those with the power to make decisions at the national, state, county, and school levels left teachers in the dark and expected them to work hard—push through, be resilient, pull themselves up by their bootstraps—all while wearing a smile and contributing to a positive environment. Accountability only works one way in this system. In this way, teachers are marginalized and devalued by those above them in the hierarchy, even while they may find themselves contributing to inequities in the structures and expectations they have for their students. In the next section it is my intention to bring attention to the ways that both teachers and students are marginalized by the same institutionalized structures which devalue their learning, their uniqueness, and their humanity. Kuby et al (2019) wrote:
With the renewed focus on accountability since No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002, school children are boiled down to simple, extractable data points to be reported to stakeholders higher up the chain of command, and this is too frequently done without also producing explanatory power over life, living, or knowing/becoming/doing literacies. The ontology and axiology has been removed (or attempted to be removed from the focus of practices). It has been solely a focus on what adults have deemed appropriate content for children. By removing a focus on ontology and axiology, we have removed conversations on relationships between children, teachers, and materials (books, writing, utensils, etc.) and the realities produced in the moments of assessing and teaching. Our focus has been on futures—if children know their letters and sounds, then they can read a book later. If they can write their letters, then later they can write a story. . . . These ways of thinking are detached from the current realities and relationships children are already entangled with/in as learners. (p. 11)
The narrow focus on test scores as the only acceptable measure of learning both devalues students’ extra-school knowledge/experience as well as reinforces a definition of learning as goal-oriented skill acquisition, rather than a continual process of becoming (Kuby et al. 2019) which values all types of interactions outside of institutionalized norms. Although all students are ever entangled as learners and come to school with volumes of life experience and knowledge, the school institution, by assigning grades (and associating those grades with meritocracy), places value on classroom content and undervalues or even others extra-school knowledges. Smith (2014) said,
starting in kindergarten, schools rarely reward poor students for the qualities they bring to their schools: their perseverance, compassion, flexibility, patience, and creativity, just to name a few. Instead they are judged on qualities determined by dominant cultural norms: the attitudes, preferences, tastes, mannerisms, and abilities valued by a system that never was designed to meet their needs. p. 15
Alexander and Fox (2013) suggested that the emphasis on goal-oriented learning and accountability emerged at the turn of the millennia out of rising questions about what it meant for learners to be “engaged” (p. 26), how engagement could be measured, and “what benefits should be realized from reader engagement” (p. 26). High-stakes testing pushed the “drive toward accountability” (p. 25), and standards-based education provided a means by which to evaluate learning:
From the stance of learning as engagement, assessments that fostered knowledge seeking around challenging, valuable, and meaningful problems and issues would be warranted. . . . However, such problems were not readily measurable. . . . Moreover, the effort to institute national standards that seemingly prescribed the content and skills learners should have acquired at given points in their school careers thus constrained the views of learners and learning. p. 25
Through the systemic use of grades to evaluate student learning, American schools delegitimize learning which is outside of the institutional curriculum. In this way, as observed by Kuby et al (2019), “it seems that the attempt to ‘standardize’ literacy classrooms has become a way to pathologize and ‘fix’ children under the guise of ethical considerations” (p. 13). Grenfell (2012) agreed that in institutionalized education,
there is a kind of ‘rite de passage’ through which all children and adolescents must pass. The required knowledge is available to all. However, according to the interpretations of a society’s elders, only some groups apparently successfully acquire it. It only needs to be added that the successful privileged few typically belong to the existing ‘dominant’ groups . . . and, unsurprisingly, those with ‘inauthentic’ visions come from less prestigious groups. p. 54
Teachers may be marginalized by the hierarchy in this same way. Britzman (1994) wrote about a beginning teacher who struggled to find her place in the school institution:
The discourse of education, with its grades, regimentation, and pull toward conformity, partly conditioned Jamie’s meanings about education and the role of teacher. Those who “cannot fit in” are blamed for their own fate, and thus identities—as opposed to the discourses on identities—become the problem. (pp. 64–65)
Students and teachers alike, though at different levels, must navigate the social waters and respond to the demands of those in power by either resisting them or assimilating to them. Because nonconformity is seen as disruptive, those who resist are criminalized or seen as deficit, and it’s assumed that any problem lies with them as opposed to the institution. This, again, is because the school institution is backed by and enforces the structure of capitalism, and in America the goodness of capitalism is considered self-evident. Schafft and Jackson (2010) said that “public education serves the economic imperative of capitalism by severing attachment to place and producing mobile, adaptable youth flexibly responsive to changing labor market conditions” (p. 2). Ever-expanding technologies and a historical framing of the United States as a land of urban and industrial progress naturalizes a “farm-to-city” (Theobald and Wood, 2010, p. 28) mentality as a necessary part of that progress. This national discourse, affirmed and enforced through textbooks, media, and politics, perpetuates the idea that American students, in order to be successful, must be always concerned with goals for the future, and become something better than they are. And as Theobald and Wood (2010) warned, “when schools operate in ways that deliver the message that success in life means migrating to the city (e. g., the successful ones will ‘go far’), they also send a message in reverse, saying in effect that staying rural means failing on some level” (p. 31, emphasis added).
Conclusion
The capitalistic structure which utilizes education as a means of producing workforce ready adults also, by necessity, perpetuates the discourse that "learning" is a future-minded, goal-oriented activity (achieving good grades, getting high scores, being employable) rather than as an ever occurring experiencing of the present. Such thinking reinforces ideas of what is and what is not learning, as well as what is acceptable behavior and what is disruption. Teachers and students who do not assimilate to institutional standards (of behavior, or grades, or attendance, etc.) are problematized. Though they bring wealths of knowledge and perspective, their identities are not valued or rewarded by the grading structures, and these structures reinforce the ideas that low achieving students are lazy and will therefore be unsuccessful and low-achieving teachers are disruptive and ineffective. Students who do not feel engaged with school curriculum are less likely to stay in school, especially when choosing between school and a steady income (yet another requirement in the structure of capitalism). Educators can play a role in making students feel valued if they commit to be continually becoming aware of the embedded discourses in their schools and communities and how their own practices, thinking, and speech enforce inequities. Additionally, educators will liberate themselves by becoming more aware.
As Tennessee rural public schools recover from the disruption caused by the Coronavirus pandemic and reassess the effectiveness of age-old methods, the opportunity is unfolding to articulate the inequities unearthed during the pandemic. In addition, we find ourselves in a continually emerging era in the field of public education in which there is an emphasis on diverse learning and multiliteracies (Alexander and Fox, 2014). In order to participate in this work of dismantling systems of power and providing equitable opportunity in the classroom, “we need to make the invisible curriculum visible—to unveil the hidden curriculum. And more important, we need to encourage students and colleagues to question the legitimacy of the hidden curriculum itself” (Smith, 2014, p. 20). Power is not owned, but is rather enforced through the unwitting acceptance of discourses perpetuated by language; therefore, to do the work of uncovering and challenging institutionalized discourses is to at least begin the work of resisting them.
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