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Abstract
Reform-Machine $chools (RM$) are produced and maintained with positivist theories of school reform whereby standardized test scores and other numeric data are the representative truth as “matters of fact” used to evaluate teacher effectiveness and school performance. Schools with higher accountability pressure due to lower performance scores also face higher rates of teacher attrition. Higher teacher attrition has a destabilizing effect that recreates the conditions for school improvement “failure.” I conducted this study in one middle school in a district that has experienced many initiatives and programming changes during the last ten years. My interview participants included experienced math and ELA teachers in grades six through eight. My goal was to develop more nuanced discussions of how accountability and teacher attrition work together within challenging school contexts and to find ways to mitigate the accountability tension forces that produce frustration for teachers.
I describe my inquiry approach as reading and process as the particular attunement I adopted with an ethic of care for how knowledge claims can be made, the ontological orientation they require, and the possible effects they can produce. Reading and process disturbs old habits of thinking and diffractively produces a field for bringing new ideas in relation. I relied on the concept of diffraction as a tool to guide a series of analytical experiments with data from interview transcripts. By using multiple diffractive iterations of analyses, I found that in an entanglement of forces in tension, that operate at varying intensities, immanent resistance and ethical practices of care can emerge in the instances of need.
The ontological orientation for this study is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s (1929/1985) process philosophy, which allowed a generative analysis of reality as encounters in immanent and ongoing relations. I used Whitehead’s process theory in this study to reconfigure typical descriptions of teacher-accountability interactions—in which each element retains a static identity—toward thinking how teacher practice operates within a field of multiple tension relations which provides the space for more caring possibilities to be enacted.