2024 Theses Doctoral

Negotiating the Machine: Stories of Teachers at No-Excuse Charter Schools Navigating Neoliberal Policies and Practices

Licata, Bianca Kamaria

Neoliberalism operationalizes the White Supremacist narrative of meritocracy in spaces like no-excuse charter schools in order to coerce teachers to obediently turn out data that is productive for investors, at the expense of both teachers and Black and Brown students’ humanity. This dissertation defines the coercion teachers experience as a process of mechanization, whereby they are inducted into the narrative of meritocracy and threatened with material loss if they do not comply.

However, contrary to current research that illustrates their repeated mechanization, I draw from my own experiences as a teacher at a no-excuse charter school to assert that teachers in these spaces do have the capacity to enact anti-racist teacher agency and resist. This dissertation therefore asks, How do educators at no-excuse charter schools engage anti-racist teacher agency to negotiate mechanization and the narrative of meritocracy?

Over the course of 13 months, I engaged with six self-described social justice-oriented teachers from three schools across two New Jersey cities through a methodology I developed called critical storying. Functioning in two parts--The Spiral and Speculation--critical storying first pays attention to participants' affective tensions through dialogic spiraling in order to identify mechanizations they experience, and ways the negotiate those mechanizations.

Then, using participants’ own narrative imagining, I wrote each participants’ story centering them as a cyborg protagonist confronting and overcoming a core mechanization. The findings, as well as the framework and methodology developed for this study, contribute to research concerned with no-excuse charter schools, anti-racist teacher agency, speculative fiction, and dismantling White Supremacy from school systems.