The Emotional Contours and Career Trajectories of (Disappointed) Reform Enthusiasts

ABSTRACT Three individual cases, drawn from a larger body of case study data, illuminate a relatively unexamined aspect of teachers’ participation in large‐scale reform‐‐teachers’ experience of heightened emotionality and its relationship to career discontinuity or career risk. Disappointed reform enthusiasts point to three conditions that intensify emotional responses to reform and appear to result in career turning points: (1) the nature and extent of reform‐related conflict within salient work groups; (2) the degree of equilibrium among multiple sources of pressure and support; (3) institutional or administrative capacity to manage the pace, scale and dynamics of reform.

[1]  J. Talbert,et al.  Teacher Professionalism in Local School Contexts , 1994, American Journal of Education.

[2]  Arthur G. Powell,et al.  The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace. , 1985 .

[3]  M. Huberman.  The Professional Life Cycle of Teachers , 1989, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[4]  Leslie Santee Siskin.  Realms Of Knowledge: Academic Departments In Secondary Schools , 1994 .

[5]  D. Muncey,et al.  Preliminary Findings from a Five-Year Study of the Coalition of Essential Schools , 1993 .

[6]  Helen C. Lee,et al.  Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School By Ted Sizer. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1984 , 1984 .

[7]  S. Ball.  The Micro-Politics of the School: Towards a Theory of School Organization , 1990 .

[8]  S. Barley,et al.  Occupational Communities: Culture and Control in Organizations , 1982 .

[9]  E. Boyer.  High school: A Report on Secondary Education in America , 1983 .

[10]  A. M. Huberman,et al.  The Lives Of Teachers , 1994 .

[11]  S. Ball,et al.  The Micro-Politics of the School: Towards a Theory of School Organization. , 1988 .

[12]  David Tyack,et al.  The “Grammar” of Schooling: Why Has it Been so Hard to Change? , 1994 .

[13]  Yrjö Engeström,et al.  Non scolae sed vitae discimus: Toward overcoming the encapsulation of school learning , 1991 .

[14]  J. Bartunek,et al.  The Role of Conflict in a Second Order Change Attempt , 1992 .

[15]  Theodore R. Sizer,et al.  Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School , 1984 .

[16]  Linda M. McNeil,et al.  Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge , 1988 .

[17]  Cynthia Parsons,et al.  The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace , 1985 .

[18]  C. Burack.  The Problem of the Passions: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory , 1995 .

[19]  J. Little.  Contested Ground: The Basis of Teacher Leadership in Two Restructuring High Schools , 1995, The Elementary School Journal.

[20]  Philip A. Cusick.  The egalitarian ideal and the American high school : studies of three schools , 1983 .