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The Business
of Teaching
Becoming a Teacher in a
Market of Schools

Meghan Stacey
 The Business of Teaching

“This book provides fascinating insight into the complex pressures that early
career teachers experience as they navigate the external demands of the market-
ised systems governing their schools and practice. The book draws attention to
the ongoing inequities of stratification and residualisation that such demands
continue to reproduce, and the ways in which new teachers within this compet-
itive and performative milieu are themselves products and subjects of the mar-
ket. Most notably, this compelling book supports the now powerful warrant for
re-thinking and re-structuring current market-oriented education systems and
schools to better reflect their equity purposes.”
—Professor Amanda Keddie, Deakin University, Australia

“Even as researchers have identified potential pitfalls with markets in educa-

tion, policymakers are enamored with their potential. But surprisingly little
attention has been paid to teachers in this emerging marketized environment.
Meghan Stacey provides a timely and highly insightful analysis of teachers nav-
igating the system from different locations in an increasingly stratified school
market, showing that—in many ways—they also are the market that policy-
makers have created.”
—Professor Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University, USA

“Meghan Stacey’s The Business of Teaching is a must read for sociologists of

education, policy researchers and policy makers, indeed for all those concerned
about career paths for teachers in a hierarchized, marketised schooling system.
The use of Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ to analyse a significant data set provides
an insightful account of the experiences of beginning teachers in this system
with important implications for those concerned about the future of the teach-
ing profession.”
—Professor Bob Lingard, Institute for Learning Science &
Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University
and Emeritus Professor, The University of Queensland, Australia
 Meghan Stacey

The Business
of Teaching
Becoming a Teacher
in a Market of Schools
Meghan Stacey
School of Education
UNSW Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-35406-0 ISBN 978-3-030-35407-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35407-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For a system that may not be of our creation, and a future that is
 Preface

About four hours south-west of Sydney is a little country town, located

a short drive inland from the busy Hume Highway. The area around the
town is famous for its cherries, and its physical beauty, especially when
not in drought—the rolling green hills, the vibrant yellow patches of
canola, the pinks and purples of the cherry blossoms in spring and the
paddocks dotted with sheep and cows make it truly picturesque. The
town itself sits on the train line and is built around the agricultural pro-
duction of local farms, although some forms of local primary industry in
the town have recently been in decline, reshaping employment opportu-
nities for local residents. While it may not be a place of particular afflu-
ence, there is nevertheless something of a divide within the population:
between the farmers and local professionals, some of whom send their
children to expensive private boarding schools in the city; and those
who may be rather newer arrivals, perhaps having come in search of rea-
sonably priced real estate and a quiet life. It is, like many rural towns
in NSW, Australia, a place of contrast; contrast that runs much deeper
than the splashes of yellow canola against the verdant green of the hills.
I spent three years of my life in this town, working as a secondary
English and Drama teacher with the NSW Department of Education.

vii
viii      Preface

As a recipient of a Department scholarship, I was guaranteed a perma-

nent teaching position as soon as I graduated and had agreed to move
anywhere in the state to take one up. As I packed up and headed off,
I looked forward to occupying at least the next few years with a life I
felt I had earned—a peaceful rural life spent walking in the countryside
or reading books on weekends and inspiring young people to love lit-
erature on weekdays. At least, I thought, I could open some doors for
my students into that world I loved, and get them to leave school for
whatever further path they chose with an open mind and more options,
perhaps, than they had before. I was pretty confident that the job was
something I could do, too. Having just graduated with a double degree
from the prestigious University of Sydney—with first-class honours, no
less—and having attended before that an academically selective public
school (one of the most exclusive types of schools in the NSW system,
whether public or private—but more on this in Chapter 1), I was, on
the whole, fairly sure of myself.
But things did not turn out as I expected. I was, like many others,
a teacher with a middle-class background, coming to teaching having
experienced success in the system as we know it. I valued, as the system
does, the more ‘academic’ subjects within the curriculum, and having
had positive experiences as a student in an academically selective school,
rather enjoyed the sense of competition that a high-stakes, exam-based
system entailed. Although I knew, having an interest in the sociology of
education, that social class played a significant role in the achievements
of students, I never quite took the next step of thinking in more con-
crete terms about what that would or could mean for me, as a teacher
with a classed, as well as raced and gendered identity of my own. I felt,
as I still feel, that education should be about social justice; yet somehow
I had retained the vague notion that my teaching role would be about
‘giving’ to students something that they ‘lacked’. I had not only misun-
derstood and underestimated the general demands of teaching, but also
the demands of teaching in such a context, and from such a perspective.
I spent the next three years scrambling. I wrote teaching programmes
(which were not routinely shared in my faculty); created and found
 Preface     ix

resources; navigated the school staff- and common-rooms; and as the

only Drama teacher in the school, wanting to provide opportunities
for access to dominant socio-cultural experiences that would impact
students’ work in the subject, organised and ran excursions to see dra-
matic performances (no mean feat being located rurally) as well as per-
formance nights at the school. I also ran extra-curricular vocal group
and debating programmes. These were some of the things I did, but lit-
tle of what I did was to my satisfaction. Areas of particular challenge
included attempts to make the curriculum ‘relevant’ to students whose
life experiences—some of them—were so very different from my own,
counter-pointed with the additional tension of the prescriptions of an
academically oriented syllabus; noting and responding appropriately
to welfare concerns; being a Year Advisor (which meant having addi-
tional welfare responsibilities for a particular year group); making and
maintaining contact with parents; teaching (and programming for) my
senior classes with confidence; and teaching more generally in such a
way as to keep all my students engaged, motivated, attending, happy
and achieving. The thousand daily interactions, both with students and
staff, full of exuberance (sometimes feigned), weariness, affection, anger,
worry and (at times) despair. A general sense of doing as much as I
could, and it still not being enough. It was utterly exhausting, and I felt
that I was alone.
For although I had a number of teacher-friends, I found I could
not always relate to the kinds of difficulties that they described in their
work. Some peers complained of the incompetence of other staff rather
than seeming to feel it in themselves. Some were drowning in marking
loads, while for me—being in a small school, but one that did not rou-
tinely share programming—the chief time-killer was preparation. While
some of us were trying to teach secondary students to read, others were
navigating interactions with large numbers of parents. Some teachers
seemed to feel fully engaged in their chosen profession, enthusiasti-
cally participating in school events and appearing confident enough to
present at Teach Meets and other practitioner-based teaching forums.
Others seemed to become more withdrawn. Some regularly broke up
x      Preface

fights in the playground; some never had. Many felt overworked and
under-valued, seeming to feel they were one of only a few staff mem-
bers actively contributing to the life of their school; others felt under-­
valued for a different reason, with limitations placed upon their scope to
run extra-curricular activities or teach senior classes. Some fled particu-
lar schools (located without exception, within my circle at least, in the
public sector) for others, often private and seemingly always of a higher
socio-economic status. Still others may have rather liked their places of
work, but felt strained and insecure because of their casual or temporary
employment status, unable or unwilling to move to a rural town as I
had done to secure a permanent position.
Meanwhile, on television and online, Christopher Pyne, the federal
education minister from 2013 to 2015, would regularly espouse the
importance of teacher ‘quality’—not funding, or any other systemic
issue—in raising student achievement across the board. Yet how could
this one factor be expected to fill in so many gaps, some seemingly so
much more precarious than others? And where was the recognition of
the different schooling contexts found across the system? This differ-
entiation of schools, it seemed to me, had many complexities; while
there were obvious differences related to seemingly intractable issues of
classed geographic segregation, there were also more deliberate, more
explicit differences, such as those of the schools labelled as ‘selective’,
‘boys’, ‘girls’, ‘sporting’, ‘creative arts’, ‘Catholic’, ‘independent’ and so
on. While schools (and teachers) were to be measured by the same sticks
(such as Australia’s national standardised testing system, the National
Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN; or the
NSW senior leaving certificate, the Higher School Certificate or HSC),
some were to have more money, homogeneity and discretion than oth-
ers; some were to select students, others were to accept students. Some
were winning in the educational marketplace, others were losing. This
was irrelevant, it seemed. For if Pyne was right, then the only reason I
should feel I was so constantly failing in such myriad ways was, quite
simply, me. But this answer was not just one that I found difficult to
hear. It was also one that seemed too easy.

* * *
 Preface     xi

This book is based on my doctoral research, undertaken from 2014

to 2018, in which I sought answers to the contradictions, considera-
tions and complexities outlined above. I wanted to know what the job
of teaching looked and felt like for other people in my stage of career.
I wanted to know whether it was just me or, perhaps, if it had some-
thing to do with the system I had been employed in. For this reason,
my project was designed around conducting detailed, in-depth case
studies of nine teachers working in highly contrasting schooling sites.
I wanted to talk to teachers about their work, and I wanted these dis-
cussions to be clearly contextualised. For this reason, I also spoke with
a colleague and a friend, partner or family member of each teacher
participant. In the pages and chapters that follow, I outline how this
project unfolded and the kinds of answers I was able to glean, first
introducing the political and academic context, including the structure
of the schooling system in NSW; and then, for the bulk of the book,
the experiences of these nine early career teachers working within it.
Throughout, I emphasise both the individual characteristics of the
teachers concerned, as well as—crucially—the specificities of the
schools in which they found themselves situated.
This centrality of contextual specificity is important to flag because it
is a specific aim of this book to actively analyse the market position of
the schools discussed within it. The kinds of differences between school
settings that I observed during my time as a teacher were not random
or the result of accident. Nor were they necessarily the result of con-
scious design. Instead, they were, and are, the result of years of accu-
mulated policy decisions both made and not made, and through which
secondary schooling in this country has become excessively marketised,
with schools opened up to ‘choice’ between differently resourced stu-
dents and parents. This cumulative policy approach has had a number
of effects, some of which have been well-documented and these are out-
lined in Chapter 1. Other effects of this system—namely the effects on
teachers—are what I explore in the rest of it, with another aim of this
book being to demonstrate these teacher cases as both unified and yet
distinctive. The reader will take away, I hope, an understanding that
teachers’ work is highly contextualised: personally, socially, culturally
and politically.
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