Threat Rigidity,School Reform,and How Teachers View Their Work Inside Current Education Policy Contexts

The Principal’s Favoring the New Teachers

Four teachers spoke in ways that suggest that the principal favored newer teachers as a whole (i.e., who came to the school when this principal was hired). The three most recently hired teachers in the English department (Melissa, Layla, Sophia) articulated cooperative, constructivist philosophies of education in their conversations with us that seemed to align with the contours of the adopted school reforms. All three—who were recently prepared in university programs—talked about privileging group learning, student-centered pedagogy, and teaching for understanding in their classrooms. For example, they viewed the move to block schedules as a useful constructivist challenge, whereas the later-career teachers in our sample were far more skeptical. We suspect that the administration considered the early-career teachers’ constructivist pedagogies as being compatible with Hawthorne reforms. As well, we suspect that the principal perceived the newer teachers as being more malleable.9 Regardless of the cause, the evidence suggests that they were favored over the later-career teachers. Layla reported that the principal told her, “You’re one of the ones I want to keep.” And at another point, Layla said, “[The administrators] pretty much know that I’m doing my job, they like what I do, so they concentrate on those teachers who are—well, the trouble people, basically.” Likewise, Melissa said,

When I learned that the English department is losing five [teacher] spots, and here I am [without seniority], I thought to myself, “Oh god, I’m going to be in trouble; my job’s in jeopardy.” But I learned that [the principal] actually had carved out a little niche for me as being a model classroom next year, one that showcases SLCs, which is a little overwhelming but great, because it means I have a job.10

Two early-career teachers suggested that there was a common perception that many of the later-career teachers inside and outside the English department were reluctant to change because it would require too much effort and that they resisted collaboration. One teacher said that many Hawthorne teachers had not changed their practice over the years as the community and student population had changed from a predominance of White students to one of students of color—thereby suggesting that the later-career teachers’ pedagogies did not match the student realities of these non-dominant-culture students (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). The following teacher said that many later-career teachers became alarmed at the move to block scheduling and then significantly more concerned about SLCs:

So [adopting a block schedule] was huge; some people were upset. And then the small learning communities [decision was made], and everyone got scared. It was like, “Oh god, we’re going to be moving into small learning communities—that means I’m going to be stuck with a group of teachers all the time, forced to collaborate.” A lot of teachers don’t like to collaborate. You know, they don’t like to go to meetings. They view it as extra work—having to change their entire curriculum so everything aligns, which [to me] makes so much more sense. [But] it’s like, you’ve got a teacher who’s been doing the same thing for 35 years, and they’ve been doing a pretty good job. They don’t want to change. They’re looking at retirement.

Notice how she moves from the specific—these later-career teachers—to what seems to be a more general indictment of “a lot of” and “so many” 35-year teachers. This shift suggests that there may be a subtle process at work by which this teacher is relying on a common stereotype about later-career teachers (parts of which may be true, parts of which are probably false) that affects her interpretation of the Hawthorne situation as it related to teachers’ career-cycle influences (Huberman, 1993a; Olsen & Kirtman, 2002). Another teacher talked about “the old school vets,” telling us that they “don’t like change—they don’t like having to change, having to turn their curriculum upside down, having to create new curriculum.” This same teacher spoke in a later interview about how the administration was “going after them” but that she herself was not worried: “I’ve got an ‘in’ with the principal—he likes how I teach and leaves me alone.”

We found that the more experienced teachers in our sample shared a cynicism toward Hawthorne’s school reforms, although none was in the group of 20 teachers directly involved in the public feud between teachers and administration. The later-career teachers in our sample revealed a kind of “been there, done that” response to school reform. They shared both a weariness and a wariness toward school change efforts. Richard said, “This is the thing that we do in education: The pendulum swings, we try new programs, we get rid of new programs. Sometimes they work, most of the time they’re just new programs.” This perspective confirms research around later-career teachers’ becoming cynical and embittered, given their multiple generations of school reform experience (Hargreaves, 2005; Huberman, 1993a; Little, 1996).

Whatever the causes, we found tensions between newer teachers (who, intentionally or not, put some of the later-career teachers on the defensive) and later-stage teachers (who may have felt misunderstood, slighted, or fatigued by cycling reform attempts). We think that these already-existent tensions flared up largely because of the frustration, loss of professional autonomy, and other threat rigidity effects that the administrative climate and school reform culture engendered. Teachers quarreled over resources and interpretations of what was happening to Hawthorne. We heard complaints against former and current teacher leaders, conversations about faculty meetings rife with “yelling,” “screaming” and “BMW—a lot of bitching, moaning, and whining.”

Teachers’ Negative Attitudes Toward Administration

All six teachers in our sample believed that the school was suffering from a “leadership crisis.” About this there was consensus. The teachers reported that the administration was “weak,” “in over its head,” and had become “Stalin—doing to teachers things you would never do to your students.” This complaint was sometimes couched in partial sympathy for the administration: The school and district administrators were between a rock and a hard place in terms of external policy pressures on the one side and the interests of students and teachers on the other. This explanation suggests that the administration was forced to make these school changes and thus act callously toward teachers. With a softening of tone, some of the English teachers told us that the administrators were good people at heart but underexperienced and overwhelmed. This perspective connects to the two-tier model of threat rigidity introduced earlier: From the perspective of these sympathetic teachers, Hawthorne leaders were caught in the place where the macro-level effect of threat rigidity (NCLB policy culture as response to education in crisis) becomes the micro-level threat (local pressure to respond to the larger sociopolicy response).

In other versions of this complaint, however, there was less sympathy and more hostility—less of a sense of administration as victim and more that it constituted malevolent leadership:

[When the new principal came in], nobody expected a dictator. . . . And when you have that—when you have this “shoot one of the soldiers to keep the others in line” kind of philosophy . . . it’s not right. The stage we’re at right now is the hatred, the development of hatred [by teachers toward administration]. People are hiding their heads. People are just “whoosh!” You know? Do your eight [hours of work] and hit the [school] gate. Don’t get involved in anything.

Within this perspective, the fault lies less in the federal policy climate and more in inept school leadership. Here, there were three primary complaints against the administration: One is that the chosen and implemented school reforms were not good ones; the later-career teachers were more likely than newer teachers to level this complaint. The second concerned the manner in which those reforms were decided and implemented—that is, how the administration mandated restrictive changes while preaching democratic reform, teacher buy-in, and consensus building. Most teachers in our sample shared this perspective. And the third complaint was that the school administration generally had “clamped down” on teachers and students in such draconian ways as to lower morale and anger teachers; all six teachers voiced this position.

Deriving from these complaints were the psychological stress, narrowed thinking, and group power struggles consistent with that of previous threat rigidity research. We found significant unease, intergroup and intragroup fighting, and defensiveness toward the administration, which combined with other threat rigidity maladaptations to produce the Hawthorne situation. For example, the ways in which the English department chair pressured teachers to follow the administration’s emphasis on standardized teaching exacerbated teachers’ ill feelings toward the administration and thus created interdepartmental tensions. Melissa believed that these pressures were antithetical to engaging students in the passion and power of literature:

The worst thing about it is that so many teachers are forced to focus on teaching to the test. We’re not teaching literature, not having fun with it. We’re not teaching kids to love poetry and books. I feel the hair on my back of my neck raise when I’m doing To Kill A Mockingbird with my accelerated class and the department chair asks me, “Well, what standard are you teaching to with that?” I’m like, “Oh my god, what standard am I not covering?!” To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the greatest pieces of literature. They’re learning about dialect, and they’re learning about theme and character as well as the world.

Sophia spoke of a similar pressure: “Our department chair passes the administration’s information to us. And so, because of her and the administration’s opinion about how our teaching should look, there’s more pressure than I have felt in years.”

Interpersonal Tensions as Negatively Affecting Student Learning Opportunities

Not only were the complaints and group tensions both an effect and a cause of the Hawthorne situation, but they were also reported to affect student learning. We found evidence that these tensions among educators spilled onto students in various ways. For example, teachers talked about how the constricted flow of communication meant that multiple kinds of school information never got to students correctly, on time, or sometimes at all: Administrative messages were not relayed to teachers; class and roster schedules changed without notice or explanation; frequent intercom messages to teachers and students interrupted class time. The teachers told us that student learning suffered as a result—specifically, in the form of breaks in student concentration; significant class time being squandered on sharing, clarifying, or correcting school information; and student and teacher stress over having insufficient information.

Three teachers talked about how they could not help but bring their schoolwide frustrations into interactions with students. Near the beginning of the school year, Melissa prophetically told us,

[At the beginning of the school year, administration] looked at the master schedule, got rid of all of our long-term subs, reassigned a few teachers, some of us had to move rooms, some of us had to actually change teaching assignments. Everything kind of shut down, and it was a really ugly process, and people were very, very angry, and that was kind of the start of this whole snowballing—just rage, really, among a group of teachers that is really, I think, probably going to play out ultimately in some kind of ugly way. But I’m just kind of trying to stay out of it. . . . Most of the time, I can come in and just focus on my class and be fine. On the days I have to attend a meeting before school, [my frustration at the meeting] affects me as a teacher. And I really became aware of it one day when I came in after meetings, and I just yelled at a student. There was shock on the little faces around me. I said, you know, “I’m really sorry. I was just in a meeting that made me really mad, and I think I’m still just kind of in a bad mood.” And then I just realized, “Wow, this is really getting to me and I don’t want it to.”

Three themes in this passage are worth noting. First, Melissa suggests that most of her time with colleagues was unpleasant—and we heard this sentiment from four of the six teachers in our sample. This finding further confirmed one effect of the Hawthorne rigidity—namely, that collegial relations among teachers were seriously strained. A second theme is that the unpleasantness occasionally affected interactions with students, although that seemed to be rare and something quickly addressed by Melissa. A third theme is that, in this passage, Melissa represents the classroom as a kind of safe place—a refuge from the school complications and a place where she can do what she entered teaching to do: work with students. As Sophia commented on “hiding in my classroom” and Susan described her classroom as a “fake world, [where] you just create whatever world you want,” Melissa invoked the theme of teacher isolation and invisibility as a buffer against the Hawthorne hostilities; we discuss this theme later in the article.

Teachers’ Interpretation of Hawthorne’s Reform Climate as Deprofessionalizing

We found that threat rigidity made teachers believe that neither the larger education policy climate nor the Hawthorne administration respected their professional practice. Specifically, all six teachers in our study were disheartened by the deprofessionalization and decreased trust: It made them resentful; it led them to isolate themselves in their classroom (“put my head down, focus on the students, and just teach)”; and it sometimes pushed them into leaving, or considering leaving, Hawthorne. The teachers spoke about how the macro-policy climate of standardization, conformity, and high-stakes testing—all threat rigidity effects—ignored the teachers’ training, talent, artistry, and skill as educators. They acknowledged that the school administration was responding to federal and state pressures in these areas, but they believed that it was not doing it well. So there were two targets of their displeasure: their school and the larger policy climate.

When asked about the new textbook series that Hawthorne administrators adopted and expected teachers to follow, Sophia talked about how the book in particular and the administrative action in general neglected her competence: “I don’t need [the book publishing company] to tell me how to engage students.” And she went on to talk about how prescriptive textbooks ignore her professional training, her teaching experience, and her knowledge of the students in her classroom. Melissa lamented that pushes for standardization and high-stakes standardized tests conceive of learning as rote facts rather than deep understandings and learning strategies. Bill said that the tests are racist for privileging White middle-class cultural literacies. Sophia said that the Hawthorne reforms made her feel like a worker bee. All the teachers mentioned how demoralizing it is to have to follow education mandates created by nonteaching educators, people who have not taught in decades, and/or politicians outside the education field. When asked if the education mandates around testing and prescriptive curricula bothered her, Melissa offered this reply:

Yes it bothers me. . . . I think it’s fine to have some core pieces of literature and some core themes, but I also love to supplement that with short stories and teach other things, poems I want them to read. And if someone starts telling me I can’t do that any more, I’m not going to like that. It takes the pride out of your work—if you’ve developed a unit or something, I think being told, “No, you have to do this instead,” is very demoralizing. It makes me feel like, then, you don’t really need trained teachers; you just need trained monkeys. It’s disrespectful to teachers.

In the teachers’ words and nonverbal cues, we frequently noticed a strong affective dimension to the threat rigidity effects around deprofessionalism; the teachers were filled with more despair than hope. These were teachers who believed that they were doing well amid difficult circumstances, working as hard as they could, and they took it personally that they were continually critiqued by their own administrators, who knew them, and infantilized by the policy culture, which did not know them. Bill offered an analogy:

[It’s like] someone going in to the community hospital and getting all the doctors and nurses together and saying, “You people! What’s wrong with you? We have too many sick people coming into this hospital and they’re not getting any better.” . . . You know, would we punish the doctors or the nurses? No. Because we understand that it’s a dynamic institution, that you address what comes through that door in the state that they come to you. There are a lot of variables. You may have 34 or 35 kids in your classroom, and you can’t just lecture to them. You have to figure what’s going on with them and reach them in ways they’ll understand, and, boy, it’s real tiring sometimes. I don’t think the powers-that-be understand this.

Escalation of Tensions and the Subsequent Leadership Change

Group tensions at Hawthorne had escalated and boiled over by the end of the year. By late spring, the public feud between a group “of about 20 disgruntled veteran teachers” and the school principal had surfaced. This feud appeared to have two related components: one, a personal opposition between the group of later-career teachers and the principal (i.e., there appeared to be mutual antipathy); two, a kind of philosophical split (part ideological and part career location) between attitudes toward school change. Administration was mandating a set of specific changes: The 20 disgruntled later-career teachers actively opposed the school reforms, and the other teachers opposed the reforms to various degrees in private or were frustrated but supported the reforms nonetheless. In late winter, Layla told us,

I’m starting to feel the lines are being drawn again. Some of the veteran teachers will start screaming at you in front of people. I feel a lot of tension, like when we’re in meetings; I feel that tenseness. There’s a sort of veteran alliance—veterans teaming together—that whole veteran thing happening.

Sophia bemoaned some of these teachers who were so actively resisting current reforms: “They get really upset by things, by the changes that are happening. There’s just a lot of griping.” However, Richard—one of the later-career teachers in our sample—saw it differently. His perspective was that the group of later-career teachers was fighting admirably for something that it believed in:

The way [that the principal] is handling the situation and the way he’s treating the staff—I knew that morale was low and a lot of people were unhappy. [Until recently] I did not realize that it was these [20 later-career] teachers specifically [who were leading the protest]—they’re all excellent teachers, teachers whose integrity or care for students can’t be questioned. I can’t stomach [all the negativity] any more, but I understand them. They’re putting their jobs on the line and saying [to the principal], “You’ve got to do something different.”

Near the end of the academic year, the principal left the school for a job in another district, and several assistant principals chose to leave or were pushed out. Of the 20 disgruntled veterans, most remained (perhaps all; it is not clear which). This outcome matches Staw and colleagues’ finding (1981) that in threat rigidity cases, the second-tier leadership (in this case, the 20 later-career teachers) often takes out the first-tier leadership (here, the recently installed Hawthorne administration). Overall, threat rigidity illuminates the brittle dynamics that had emerged among adults at Hawthorne: demarcated battle lines, deteriorating communication, heightened emotions, and increased defensiveness.

Tightened Structures and Policies and the Pressure to Standardize

School structures and personnel policies tightened up, and the teachers’ felt increased pressure to standardize their practice. Of the multiple reforms taking place at Hawthorne during the 2005–2006 school year, the implementation of curricular mandates took center stage, such as the development and use of curricular maps and the adoption of a new textbook series. We found both tangible and symbolic effects from these mandates. Here, we examine the adoption of curricular maps.

The development of, and unevenly forced adherence to, these maps dominated the teachers’ work during the year. As well, opportunities for professional growth were co-opted under the auspice of this reform: Just about all Hawthorne professional development days were reportedly devoted to curricular maps and the WASC visit, which disappointed teachers who expected more substantive development opportunities from their in-service professional days. Sophia said,

We had to do a lot of—they weren’t really professional development days but happened during those times. They were days when we spent a lot of hours together—days where we had to build the whole curriculum map thing.

Not only did the teachers believe that the curricular maps constrained their teaching work, but they also believed that their professional autonomy suffered and their expertise was slighted. Weighing in on this point, Melissa told us,

I feel like you need to give kids a broad range of skills, and there are a lot of classroom experiences that they will benefit tremendously from in life, things learned in high school that are not necessarily in the standards or the map. And so I’m certainly not going to limit myself to those [curriculum mandates]. I’ll do them, and I’m completely willing to be accountable for the things I’m supposed to teach, but I am in no way going to limit myself to them—even though that’s what I think this school wants. I shouldn’t have to justify why I’m having students give a speech or an oral presentation. If someone can’t see the value in that, then I can’t explain it to them. It’s frustrating.

None of the six teachers in our study opposed the concept of curricular maps; they all discussed positive aspects of having the maps as a shared resource, and four teachers talked about the value of vertically and horizontally integrating course contents. However, the administration’s reported hypocrisy and contradictory insistence on strict adherence rankled teachers. The perceived hypocrisy was that the administration mandated these maps as a useful way for departments to open up their practice and create useful guides to follow, but the reality—according to the teachers in our sample—was that the maps were used by administration as a way to control and standardize teaching. Sophia said, “If we don’t have the map at hand, we’re made to feel that somehow we’re not doing our job.

In practice, most teachers did not meaningfully collaborate on the development of these maps; instead, most departments, we were told, treated them as busy work: perfunctorily filling them in to have something to submit by the deadlines. There was an unevenness across departments, with some taking it seriously, with some farming it out to willing volunteers, and with some ignoring the mandate altogether. We were told that the maps were not used as a guide but as a script for standardizing teaching. Melissa said,

We were told at various times over the course of the year: “This is your bible, and I [as assistant principal] want to be able to walk into any class English 1 class on a given Wednesday and see all of you on the same page and the same chapter.”

The second complaint from teachers relates to the administration’s contradictory insistence on strict adherence. Most of the teachers in our sample resented being told that they must follow the curricular maps; yet, at the same time, they knew that Hawthorne administrators were not going to conduct surveillance in teacher classrooms. None of the teachers with whom we spoke enacted the maps with any fidelity. They described the school’s use of maps as a temporary reform: Teachers would use them when they had to, while waiting for the pendulum to swing back. They considered the maps ill-fitting to the needs of their students. Teachers had no reason to believe that the mandate would be enforced and so did not take the development very seriously. In the end, most teachers viewed the maps as merely a façade for the accreditation review. It was, they reasoned, all about the externally visible structures of schooling, not the core work of classroom teaching and learning. Melissa put it this way:

This is all about WASC. When WASC comes, the administration has pretty much said, “You better be where you’re supposed to be on your curricular map.” And the thing that I hate is you have to pretend to be doing this and generate two days’ worth of lesson plans, and I think that just beats the whole purpose of WASC, [which] is supposed to be so that we can reflect and see what’s working and what isn’t working. We’re all faking for WASC. How are they going to be able to give us any valuable input? How are we going to grow? So I just think it’s a sad state of affairs.

The teachers frequently talked about the curricular maps as a failed reform and an unpleasant and simultaneously unfair, unwarranted, and unsuccessful attempt at standardizing their practice. Most spoke in similar ways about the textbook adoption, the advisory period, and the move to SLCs.

Communication Constricted and Made More Hierarchical

Another dimension of the cognitive and structural inflexibility at Hawthorne was that communication was constricted between administration and teachers and among teachers. This created a stressful work environment and so limited opportunities for professional growth. Four teachers complained about not having a clear sense of what was happening in the school. Sophia said,

Just constant lack of communication, and a lot of it just has to do with people being overwhelmed. There’s too many people. We’ve got a failing technology system going on, and people aren’t fully informed. There’s no way to keep up on all of it.

Whereas all six teachers felt uninformed, four of the teachers described frustration over not having their voices heard within the administration; the perception was that administration was listening to only a small subset of Hawthorne’s teachers to inform decision making. Richard told us, “It seems that the principal is listening to a very small cheerleading section and ignoring everyone else. And that’s the part, I think, that’s making everybody more upset.” Other teachers, outside our sample, reported this sentiment to the local newspaper, including one who was quoted as saying that she felt intimidated by the principal and another administrator and had thus hired a lawyer to help her avoid reassignment. Susan likened the administration’s leadership approach to that of a cruel classroom teacher:

[Our administrators are] treating their teachers in a way you’d never treat your students. If you had a large group of students, and you had five who wouldn’t do their work, who talked and misbehaved all the time, would you take your smartest kid or your best kid and punish the hell out of them? Hell no, you wouldn’t do that. You’d go get some perspective. You’d go watch those guys. You’d make sure they do what they are supposed to do. You’d ride the trouble-causing ones a bit and compliment the good ones. You would not punish everybody!

Taken together, the restricted communication and the sense that the administration was unreceptive to most teacher input elevated frustrations about administrative decisions. Overall, the teachers complained that the decision-making process had became less transparent. With increasing frequency, teachers did not know the rationale behind the reforms being adopted. Teachers felt powerless to offer dissent or suggest alternatives. We also heard from the newer teachers that they believed that their jobs could be in jeopardy and that their working environment would be made more hostile if they voiced opposition to administrative decisions. For example, Layla said,

I’m scared; I’m not going to go toe-to-toe with [the department chair or the principal] about anything, because the next thing I know, I’m going to get my [next year’s class] schedule, and I’ll be just like all those other teachers that are currently being screwed over—teachers who have a miserable schedule: five different preps in five different rooms.

A reported example of the lack of transparency and the disregard of teacher input involved the decision to restructure the school around SLCs. These were described as a school change that had been considered in previous years but repeatedly voted down. As such, there was anger toward the administration when the proposal to shift to SLCs was adopted the previous year. Richard told us,

We were told the faculty was going to make the decision [about the SLCs]; we were told teachers were going to vote on it. We were told what the percentage would have to be: 75% of the voters would have to approve it. But a week before the vote, or 2 days before the vote, we were told that instead of 75%, it had suddenly dropped to 50% plus one. And then, at the last minute, somebody supposedly called targeted groups of parents, and all of a sudden a group of parents now had a vote. Nobody knows for sure—nobody’s talking about what group of parents it was or who decided to make the phone calls to bring them into the equation and what they were told, but it wasn’t every parent in the district or school. . . . So, of the teacher votes, out of about 130 people, it was something like 8 or 9 votes more in favor than against. It wouldn’t have passed under the initial rules. The parent votes came out in favor. And teachers who were gone on school business that day were not allowed to vote. So it passed. The whole thing left a sour taste in most teachers’ mouths.

Communication troubles also existed among teachers. As mentioned, we found a general apprehension toward collaboration: Four of the six teachers talked about not wanting to collaborate with others, and the other two spoke generally about how teachers at Hawthorne typically resist working together. The presence of the 20 disgruntled veterans, whose identities were largely unknown, revealed additional evidence of how communication was restricted among teachers. None of the teachers in our study—but for one later-career teacher, who knew of a few of these veterans—could (or would) identify this subgroup, which had amassed so much local power and which had forced the principal out of the school. This finding suggests not only that these 20 teachers felt the need to do their work in the shadows for fear of reprisal but also that lines of communication were so frayed at Hawthorne that no one knew what was happening outside his or her narrow field of vision, and so everyone’s interpretation became its own subjective truth—a kind of Rashomon effect.

Restricted communication was also revealed in how teachers talked about the larger policy contexts in which the Hawthorne situation was situated. We found that five of the six teachers knew very little about NCLB—what it was, how it came about, how it might be influencing Hawthorne. Four of the teachers talked about NCLB in vague, broad, mostly negative terms:

Sophia: I can’t keep the acronyms straight. All I know is that there’s pressure for me to do certain things and it’s told to me through my admin, to my department chair, and then down to me. I’m never let in on the larger picture.

When pressed on particulars or asked to say more about NCLB, these teachers typically drew a blank or offered vague or inaccurate information. One readily acknowledged knowing nothing about it. The teacher in our sample who the newest to the profession was relatively knowledgeable about it: She had looked it up online and had read about it in professional journals, she said. Most teachers in the sample used it as a scapegoat on which to blame just about everything that they considered wrong in education. They had been exposed to sufficient anti-NCLB rhetoric in the press and in conversations with others so much so that it acted as a kind of proxy for some Orwellian future in schools: an education bogeyman just around the corner, waiting to pounce on everything that is good in schooling today. Generally, what we found is that the teachers were far more focused on the educational conditions right in front of them. The immediate school events and teaching policies that affected their daily work at school eclipsed any distant, higher-tier policy pressures that may or may not be trickling down.

This scenario makes sense. It is not surprising that people focus most closely on those conditions directly in front of them. But we suspect that it also suggests that Hawthorne’s restricted communication and singular focus on WASC, which dominated school meetings and professional development days, precluded opportunities for administrators to explain, and for teachers to learn about, federal and state policies that factor into the reforms, policies, and climate of Hawthorne. Another school, one not experiencing the effects of a threat rigid environment, may have been freed up to dedicate professional time to learning the policies that shape daily operations and school changes. This open communication might have produced more awareness of the bind that the school was in (and, hence, more sympathy for those affected by it), some camaraderie among Hawthorne staff, and better conditions for shared problem solving. And these effects might have in turn looped back to improve personnel conditions and perhaps even encouraged innovative thinking; we return to this point in the conclusion.

Pressure to Conform to the Administration’s Reform Vision

There was increased pressure to conform to the administration’s reform vision, thereby leaving no or little attention to flexible thinking. That is, the threat rigidity response of cognitive and structural inflexibility is possibly best represented by the increased pressure on the teachers to conform, which left little or no room for attention to divergent thinking. Absent from the collected data was any attention on the part of the administration to encourage teachers to think differently about teaching and learning or about school improvement. Instead, the whole of the reforms, the school climate, and the various actions by the administration appeared to encourage a lockstep emphasis on conformity, which silenced opportunities for creative thinking. School conditions did not encourage innovative ideas; instead, they emphasized managing resources efficiently, controlling teaching, and bracing for attack. Sophia said that she had appreciated, in previous years, teacher meetings and professional development days as meaningful opportunities to think about her work—but no longer: “I am just getting really frustrated by things I hear in all these meetings throughout the year. It’s all about WASC or how we have to follow the maps or adhere to the textbook. Or some administrator’s complaints about us.”

Job security was subtly present in the teachers’ worries. Threats to job security were perhaps more symbolic than direct, but nonetheless, several of the teachers whom we studied believed that people in the administration were intentionally creating a perception that teachers who disobeyed in word or deed might be “pink-slipped” (i.e., released or transferred to another school in the district). Rumors emerged about falling student enrollments, which would lead to a loss of several English teacher positions. Teachers in our sample (especially, the newer ones) took this threat seriously; yet, at the same time, they were angry in their belief that this was a strong-arm tactic. The six teachers reacted in various ways: A few went undercover with their dislike of the situation while publicly maintaining appearances; a few tried to create their own personal niche within the department or with the principal, to secure their place at the school; most developed contingency plans to teach in another district or in another school within the district, if necessary; and Richard transferred to another school.

Going undercover—or, in Bill’s words, embodying some variation of being “a good soldier”—was evident across the English teachers in our sample. Their general reaction was to publicly conform to the wishes and mandates of the administration but privately and carefully say and do what they wanted—both in their comments to us and in their practice (i.e., their closed-door classroom). There was also a sense that the more recently hired teachers needed to publicly support the principal so that their lack of seniority would not be used against them. Layla told us that she said to him, “‘You’re the principal, you’re the boss. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ I’d rather not lose my job.” As such, Sophia began looking for other jobs within and outside of education; Richard interviewed at other schools in the district; and Susan changed departments within Hawthorne and put out feelers for jobs in other districts. Layla did consider teaching elsewhere. Richard described for us the personal toll that this year took on him and why the Hawthorne situation motivated him to migrate to another school:

I was going home in a bad mood. My blood pressure was going up. I’d wake up in the morning and didn’t want to go to work, didn’t want to be there. And I’ve always loved my job. So when they came out in the spring and said that enrollment is decreasing and said we’re going to have to eliminate six English teachers—either through retirement, transfers, or forced transfers. . . . I don’t enjoy coming here in the morning, and they’re going to force somebody to move, so I may as well volunteer rather than have somebody who wants to stay here be asked to move somewhere new. So I did.

Finally, the WASC review not only interacted with existing changes but also acted as a direct influence on teachers, pushing them to conformity and restricting their flexible thinking. As we have mentioned, Hawthorne’s recent WASC review history had not been favorable, and the current year’s accreditation visit was important. The WASC as an external threat that operated in direct and indirect ways. In a direct way, WASC promised reviewer walk-throughs in which teachers had to ensure that their practice was in perfect conformity with school reforms and one another’s classrooms. In an indirect way, WASC (as it was framed by the school administration) had created a schoolwide ethos of pressure to conform. Again, the WASC visit was a disappointment to many. Layla lamented the outcome:

We teachers worked our butts off for this—tried really hard to get good scores, did what we were told to do. So many teachers were into it, involved in the work, and then we get this horrible report—nothing about anything we were doing right. Nobody wanted to talk about it or hear anything about it. It was all very strange.

Melissa characterized how the WASC experience had exacerbated existing tensions all year long and had blown the disenfranchisement wide open by late spring:

We had WASC this year and had to go to all of these meetings that were so tedious and horrible, and people were really just starting to hate any kind of meeting time to the extent that I think nobody really feels like what they say matters or what they want matters in the eyes of the administration. People feel really disenfranchised and angry. It’s really ugly right now, and it was never this ugly before, even though there were still problems.

Although the resentment and negativity were taking a significant toll on the attitudes of most teachers, they told us that what happened in their classrooms did not change much. The threat response emphases on conformity and standardization had created an unpleasant and stifling professional climate, but they do not appear to have changed the teachers’ classroom practice. Teachers reported maintaining the appearance of adhering to maps, using the new textbooks, and following the administration’s seemingly rigid rules (including a new mandatory teacher sign-in policy). And it is possible that the WASC review team identified the point that we make here: that there appeared to be a disconnect between how Hawthorne represented its practice and what actually occurred in classrooms. This finding raises themes of visibility and invisibility.

Why Teachers Gravitated Toward Autonomy

The teachers gravitated toward professional autonomy and the freedom to teach as they desired for several reasons. The way that the teachers conceived of, valued, and defended their professional autonomy varied according to their professional preparation experience, their locations on the career cycle, and their individual differences. Some teachers said that they had been professionally prepared to diagnose kids and learning situations, design curriculum and plan lessons accordingly, and react to each class’s unfolding dynamic as they perceived it. Richard raised the conflict between his professional training and the current climate of standardization:

The emphasis [in my preparation program] was on planning lessons, which now I do somewhat, but [these days] a lot of things are dictated—more than I thought they would be. I can’t use what I learned. . . . There was great emphasis placed in my program on knowing the students—they were the focus. Now it’s all about what’s in the textbook and what the state standards tell you.

There was also a career cycle factor: The newer teachers were more receptive to peer support and administrative assistance, whereas midcareer and later-career teachers believed that they had earned commensurate levels of control and freedom inside their classrooms. We found that all six teachers equated autonomy in their classrooms with the notion of a high-quality teacher: Autonomy was considered a mark of professionalism. We also noticed that status entered into the equation: There was a sense, on the part of the teachers, that autonomy correlates with professional respect; that is, any teacher who is left alone must be a good teacher indeed.

These teachers’ embedded presumptions correspond in part to a long history of the isolated nature of teaching (Cuban, 1993; Lortie, 1975) and the teacher as independent artisan (Huberman, 1993b). The teachers in this study all, to some degree or another, presumed that such control of their classrooms was part of the job and that each had earned it. In fact, several teachers referenced autonomy in the classroom as they explained why they became teachers and talked about their work. For example, Melissa bemoaned the current policy climate for removing the artistry from teaching:

I think that some standardizing of [the curriculum] is fine, [but] I think trying to have the lockstep—you teach chapter 2 on Day 5—is ridiculous. That takes all the artistry out of teaching, and I think when you’re supposed to have a student-driven classroom, some kids just don’t understand things [the same way]. . . . It’s completely inappropriate to expect teachers to just march through and expect the kids to get anything out of it.

All six teachers believed that having autonomy in their classroom, with their students, was part of the job, part of being a professional, and that it should only be eliminated if there are clear signs of a teacher’s incompetence or if students are not being well served. Teachers blamed the policy culture in general and the Hawthorne climate in particular for threatening their professional autonomy.

We detected a powerful sentiment: that although these teachers supported the notion of standardizing curriculum to a limited extent and agreed with the general idea of accountability in principle, they found the Hawthorne reforms to be overly prescriptive, misaligned with student-centered instruction, and professionally demeaning. But the teachers told us that no one ever came in to check on them (except during the WASC preparation and visit); as such, no one was sure how to interpret the mixed messages. “So basically you feel like, who’s running this zoo?” Melissa said. Several of the teachers mentioned that if efforts to script their teaching intensified or if unsupportive observers regularly came into their classrooms, they would move to another school. Melissa was one of them, telling us, “If the climate gets so ugly that I’m just miserable, I won’t stay. I just won’t keep doing it. Why be miserable? Life’s too short.”

However, for the most part, the teachers had the autonomy that they wanted, which derived from multiple factors. We describe these factors as existing inside three categories: One is the federal policy climate. Although both its letter and spirit advocate strong standardization and accountability, NCLB as policy focuses more so on the primary grades; that is, its indirect climate effects are weaker in most U.S. high schools. Despite being an under-performing school, Hawthorne had been meeting its academic performance index and adequate yearly progress scores and so was not technically a high-priority target. As Bill described, “NCLB is coming down the pike but hasn’t parked here yet.”

The second category is the local context. As a large, traditional, comprehensive high school, Hawthorne has a long history of loose coupling and “egg-crate” (i.e., isolated) teaching structures (Cuban, 1993; Weick, 1976), which has meant that for many decades, teacher isolation (and its more attractive companion, autonomy) has been the norm. Richard, who had taught at Hawthorne for 7 years, said,

When I first started here, each teacher within the department was left very independent, very independent to come up with your own lessons. We were given a general description of the things we needed to cover during the year, and that was it.

This school—like many traditional high schools—had enacted a professional culture in which teachers taught how they wanted, avoided “talking shop” at lunch and otherwise steered clear of having deep discussions of practice (especially, those concerning their own weaknesses and challenges), and maintained mostly isolated classroom communities that the teachers in our study variously called their “fiefdoms,” kingdoms,” and “perfect little worlds.”

The third category of explanation is that the Hawthorne administration was simultaneously focused on so many things that observing teachers seemed a low priority. This meant that the teachers were rarely observed, evaluated, or pressed to actually change their practice to align with the intent of the reforms. Bill said,

I think most people—what they’ve done before is they close the door and teach their kids the very best way they can. They try to adhere to the standards, try to adhere to what we’re being asked to do, but we’re not doing either slavishly.

Sophia said that for many teachers the response to administrative coercion was to hide: “Teachers would just get upset, and so they would isolate themselves.”

Sophia said that even though the department was required to develop and follow curricular maps, “I was like, ‘Well, thank you, [but] I’m just still going to do what I have to do and pick my own [reading] selections.’” When we asked her if there might be consequences to ignoring the curricular maps, she told us, “In my 3 years of teaching, I’ve had one 10-minute evaluation. . . . Nobody knows what the heck I’m doing!” In another conversation she said, “Nobody ever comes in to check up on me. . . . It’s like, ‘You guys never come to see me! If you really cared, you’d come and bark at me.’” This connects to the logic of confidence (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) coming from new institutionalism theories that explain loose coupling. As mentioned earlier, education stakeholders (e.g., district officials, the tax-paying public, state politicians) are convinced that schools do their job well if they outwardly resemble the public’s image of good schooling. This perception governs the external structures of schooling, such as the buildings, the teacher qualifications, and the rhetoric of successful and/or improved teaching. As long as these visible logics are met, the public remains confident that good teaching and learning are occurring inside the classrooms. At Hawthorne, this explains the administrative focus on teacher certification, curricular maps, and high-profile reforms such as block scheduling and a move to academies within the school. Such a phenomenon allows a school to appear improved without changing its classroom instruction much. For these three reasons, then, the teachers still mostly had the autonomy for which they were prepared, of which they desired, and with which they had become familiar. Layla said,

It’s not like there is anybody breathing down my neck at school, and they aren’t going to breathe down my neck as long as I—and this is true for the whole culture at [Hawthorne]—as long as there is a hint that you’re doing your job, no one is going to bother you. I could be literally locking the door and showing movies 24 hours a day, and as long there’s the hint that I’m doing my job, they’re not going to bother me.

In many ways, the WASC review presented an unwanted intrusion into the teachers’ core work. The curricular maps had been implemented a few years earlier, apparently in response to district pressures to standardize and make visible the learning that occurred in classrooms (and perhaps as a threat effect from the previous WASC visit). The curricular maps had been unpopular from the beginning, but teachers reported little previous pressure to actually follow them: As long as the curricular maps existed in folders on shelves, the administration was satisfied. But this past year, because of the impending WASC review, teachers were expected to follow the maps—or at least ratchet up the appearance of following them via written lesson plans, posters on classroom walls, and stacks of color-coded paperwork visible on their desks. This façade annoyed the teachers in our sample.

To different degrees and in different ways, five of the six teachers said that they would move schools if their autonomy in the classroom were eliminated or severely threatened. All teachers reported a positive correlation between classroom autonomy and their commitment to the school and the profession. And throughout our interviews, the teachers shared a perception that the current policy culture was slowly eroding their professional freedom and autonomy in the classroom. Because this was, for them, a nonnegotiable requirement of their work, they were prepared to move or leave if their autonomy disappeared.11 Loose coupling was a structural feature that allowed the Hawthorne teachers to endure this component of threat rigidity, at least to an extent.

The Effects of Loose Coupling on Autonomy and Otherwise

The loose coupling that allowed teachers some autonomy in their classrooms produced other effects, however. One effect was that of a culture that discouraged collaboration and honest conversations about teaching, learning, and assessment. The classroom autonomy meant that few teachers at the school were collaborating in any substantive way. Layla lamented this sentiment:

It’s a bummer because I’m very social. I need to have people to hang out with, talk to, get ideas from—sort of bounce ideas off of. I have to have a social circle at work. Just like students need each other to be successful and motivated, I need to hang out with people who know what teaching is all about, who know what teaching means.

Melissa shared her dislike of faculty meetings: “The minute I have to go to a meeting after school, I’m just like, ‘Arghh!’ At the end of fifth period, I could have another 8 hours with students, but [meetings] really get me down.” We suspect that this isolated teaching culture at Hawthorne sacrificed potentially valuable opportunities for team teaching, cross-classroom observations, professional development, and authentic conversations about teaching and learning. These teachers reported receiving none or very little feedback on their practice (i.e., feedback from adults), and what they did report receiving was often secondhand (e.g., a fellow staff member said that she had heard from students that a teacher was doing well). The negative pressure of threat rigidity to cope with visibility (Keltchermans, 2006) meant that teachers had to keep up appearances—to talk and act as if everything in the classroom was going well and that the school reforms were being faithfully implemented. We additionally suspect a reciprocal link to the intergroup and intragroup tensions discussed above: Would those interpersonal tensions lessen if teachers were less isolated? Would the teachers become less isolated if there were not these external mandates to conform?

There was a sense, stronger in the newer and midcareer teachers, that visibility was desirable (e.g., opening up one’s classroom for others to see, building collegial ties, engaging in collaborative teaching); however, there was also a distrust that Hawthorne’s present attempts to raise teacher visibility had the teachers’ or students’ interests anywhere close at heart. Several teachers in our sample talked about their good work going unrecognized by school and district administrators, and they lamented that teachers and students were inadequately praised for having raised schoolwide test scores. Susan said,

A couple years ago, we were unhappy with some of the things about the state and the government; they put a gun to our head a bit. We were pressured and we got stressed, and what happened was people pulled together, we made our [academic performance index], we’ve made our [adequate yearly progress] every year. We pulled that up. We made the reading program work. It happened. People did pull together. And it wasn’t enough. When you have somebody continuing to say, “We’re not making it, we’re not making our target,” and we’re like, “We made it! We did it!” What the hell? Then what are you going to do? Just f—k it! Forget it! You know what I mean? . . . We should be having marching bands running through the rooms!

Like the effects of threat rigidity presented thus far, the decrease in professional autonomy and the multiple anxieties around visibility and invisibility not only affected the maladaptive school climate but were also affected by it. Like the other threat responses, it angered the teachers, constrained their work, and intensified schoolwide tensions about the direction of reform at Hawthorne.

Rethink How to Restructure a School Culture

There are better ways to restructure a school culture. We recommend that policy makers consider and predict threat rigidity effects before initiating reform programs and that school leaders, too, pay special attention to these maladaptive patterns before commencing whole-school reform initiatives. For example, school restructuring researchers might take a look at our data and exclaim, “Did we not learn these lessons already?” Although school restructuring as a systematic reform approach has not fully disappeared, its influence has fallen victim to a different and politically powerful paradigm currently en vogue: large-scale accountability, a focus on quantitative outcomes, and the top-down emergence of a coded disdain for teachers (Cochran-Smith, 2006; King, 2004; McDermott, 2007; Meier & Wood, 2004). Yet, the restructuring movement still offers useful recommendations: Go slowly; that is, implement multiple reforms in integrated or sequenced ways. Foreground school context as an active variable. Scaffold candid conversations among administration, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders about the reforms. Include teachers in all reform phases and treat them like professionals. Use professional development wisely, avoiding one-time, onsite mandatory events and instead offering a network of teacher-chosen, off-site flexible projects and activities that align with reform goals.

Actively Avoid Threat Rigidity

A school that feels threatened by, yet has to abide to, the current policy culture will benefit from consciously striving for exactly the opposite of all threat rigidity effects. We understand that threat rigidity is a natural organizational response to a perceived external threat; therefore, we place partial responsibility for what happened at Hawthorne on federal and state policy pressures. But we also believe that if a school leadership team acknowledges and considers threat rigidity effects beforehand, then it can better respond to a threatening situation and wisely plan its course of reform. This agenda would include school leaders’ discussing case studies like Hawthorne and opening communication, encouraging innovative thinking, supporting teachers, and striving to put forward a climate of cooperation and trust. Essentially, we advocate identifying potential threat rigidity effects and responses and then consciously doing what would prevent them. This kind of threat rigidity attention would not eliminate the perceived threat but position a school to successfully address the perceived crisis and adapt in response to it. Specifically, we suspect that earning the trust of teachers, encouraging innovative thinking, formalizing open lines of communication, and promoting an inclusive reform ethos would eliminate or significantly lessen threat rigidity responses.

Encourage Teacher Education Programs to Acknowledge Current Reality

Teacher education should not neglect current education realities and contradictions. The current policy climate may intentionally or not be creating a professional landscape in teaching in which the creative, daring, and iconoclastic candidates will not enter teaching (precisely those whom we believe education should covet); rather, those who do enter the profession may be predisposed and so primed for conformity, decreased decision making, and passive acceptance. If public school teaching becomes known as a profession of following orders, only those comfortable with this kind of obedience will enter or remain in the profession. We fear that this would lower the quality of and innovations in learning and democracy in the United States.

In addition, the clichéd gap between theories of teaching and learning (held by university teacher education) and practice realities (which teachers confront in K–12 schools) is apt here. Although we find this theory-versus-practice split exaggerated and erroneous, we have noticed a powerful, rarely acknowledged contradiction: Teacher educators often prepare teachers to freely design, enact, and assess student learning, but many K–12 schools require teachers to deliver standardized curricula, follow teaching scripts, and abide by off-the-shelf high-stakes tests. As we found at Hawthorne, it can be pedagogically limiting and professionally insulting for well-prepared student-centered teachers to have to fit into such restrictive didactic teaching roles. If, as it appears, the current policy culture is here for a while, more teacher educators should formally address it as part of the professional landscape. We recommend that teacher education programs consider introducing effects of the policy climate in explicit, honest ways that seek to prepare beginning teachers for what it means to work in “underperforming” or “high priority” schools like Hawthorne. By addressing ways that teachers can interpret and navigate these tensions in today’s mandate-heavy school landscape, teacher education can offer collaborative preservice development around current policy effects. Entering teachers would therefore already have some knowledge of, strategies for, and allies within the policy-related work contexts that they will face in schools. Thusly equipped, they will be prepared to interpret their professional contexts, interact with policy reforms, effectively resist (if they choose), successfully hybridize their practice (if they choose), and actively participate in school improvement deliberations. What this study has examined as threat rigidity might then be reframed by artful teachers and school administrators as transformation opportunity instead.