Street-Level Teacher Discretion and the Politics of Civic Education

• In Event: Teachers and Education Politics

Abstract

Teachers are street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010; Zacka, 2018) who exert considerable discretion in classrooms, where their politics inform education policy implementation. Faced with a plethora of decisions about content and pedagogy, teachers are dually educators and policymakers whose discretion makes the learning policies written by political elites. The discretion of civic educators in particular can shape democratic development of youth within and beyond the classroom that can promote, or hinder, public democratic life. As such, I argue teachers are political actors. This paper presents a typology of teachers as political agents (TPAs) that captures an interaction between their partisan persuasion, level of political interest and engagement, democratic climate at school, political tensions around education at the local and national level, and pedagogical and curricular decisions. Extensive fieldwork reveals that a teacher’s overall political engagement, rather than their partisan persuasion, has a greater influence on student democratic engagement outcomes, while a teacher’s partisan persuasion shapes civic content.

Author

• Abigail Dym, Providence College