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Teacher Incentives as Reforms: Teachers' Work and the Changing Control Mechanism in Education

The historian Paul Mattingly has argued that most twentieth-century literature on teaching has portrayed reform as a matter of rational debate or as a particular response to acknowledged social needs, isolated from the considerations of social policy or power. He states that “invariably such discussions immediately reduce themselves to limited questions of curriculum design, organizational planning, and to administrative and psychological accommodations to primary and secondary levels of schooling.“l Mattingly maintains that this stereotypic thinking has separated teaching and teacher education from the complexities of social history to such an extent that U.S. teachers have never experienced the control over their workplace necessary to sufficiently fulfill their educational responsibilities. Such is the case with the current reforms in teaching. Since 1980, school reforms have been initiated by almost every state in the nation; mandates, guidelines, or pilot studies that aim to improve the quality of teaching are currently being implemented. Legislative committees, governors, state departments of education, philanthrophic foundations, and the federal government have made educational reform an agenda item tied to issues of economy and national revival. These general initiatives have been realized in the State of Wisconsin through eight experimental projects concerned with creating career ladders and teacher-incentive programs. This article explores the assumptions, implications, and consequences of these projects, with a particular focus on the institutional conditions and power relations in which these projects were developed.2 It will be argued that while the reform’s rhetoric supports improvements in teachers’ working conditions, the restructuring prompted by reform efforts in fact reduces teacher responsibility through standardization of conduct, increased bureau-