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 2 Centralization, Mobilization, and Selective Engagement P erhaps the most important presumption of this book is that public school teachers are inescapably political actors. Since they represent local or central governments in their classrooms and, often, in their local communities, their interactions with pupils, parents, administrators, and communities constitute state-society relations. They provide services to the polities whose taxes pay their salaries, their labor constitutes an investment of public money, and their identities are a matter of public legitimacy. And they are embedded in a process of social reproduction, with implications for both national cohesion and economic development. A generation of research on Progressive Era school reform in the United States has resurrected teachers from the historical darkness and shown their importance for understanding the education politics of that era. In France, along with the rest of Europe, the importance of teachers has been less in question, since their role in cultural reproduction has been longer acknowledged. I hope that this book can at least reaffirm the idea that depoliticized education—“taking the schools out of politics”—is a fiction with a discursive use-value confined solely to politics. For as long as states have controlled schools, their employees have been political actors. But the claim that public school teachers are inescapably political actors has multiple dimensions, just like their roles. It means that their actions, identities, and employment status are embedded in power struggles. To the extent that public education is a matter of salient political discourse, teachers’ quotidian lives become objects of public scrutiny, as their work becomes revalued according to the prevalent norms of the moment. Loyalty to the state, administrative efficiency, moral righteousness, and adherence to gender norms are just some of the measures of orthodox behavior to which public school teachers Centralization, Mobilization, and Selective Engagement 19 have been expected to adhere. Finally, teachers are workers, and like workers in most parts of the world, they have sought, both individually and collectively, to improve their salaries and quality of life. And from time to time, they have even contested the conditions of their employment and the content of their work. Their unions, this book suggests, are the results of long-standing conflicts sprung from the tensions wrought by their involvement in these various roles and missions. Teachers’ unions did not exist anywhere in Europe or the United States until the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and the impetus for teachers to form organizations of any kind, particularly those devoted to collective claim making, was relatively weak. Teachers’ involvement in public politics was at best frowned on—at worst, outlawed. Their occupational lives rarely became subjects of direct intervention by central authorities. Collective bargaining was unheard of, as it was in labor relations more generally during this period of history. Furthermore, given the proximity of teachers to the youth of their countries, their private lives were also the subjects of scrutiny. Their leisure activities, summertime travels, religious practices, and marital status were all subjects of concern to the local governments they worked for and the families they served. On the eve of centralization struggles, they were individuals embedded in local communities, interacting daily with the families they served, but they were also government employees and state agents. If “street-level bureaucrats ,” by definition, provide their services with unusual visibility, flexibility , and relative autonomy from organizational authority, then the teachers of late nineteenth-century Europe and America did not quite fit the label. While they were certainly profoundly visible in their communities, they were not truly autonomous from their employers. It is these observations that direct me toward the following formulation of the problem: How did teachers mobilize, and how did their collective contestation of state activities become regularized (and, thereby, effectively embedded in the state)? Understanding teachers’ collective action requires attention to teachers as social movement actors, challengers of the regimes they work for, and as state actors, members of the regimes they work for. These regimes are simultaneously the sources of their influence and of the limitations of that influence.1 Penetrating this complexity means that standard formulations of the relationship between human agency and sociopolitical structure must be reconsidered. From the perspective of state theory, the state needs to be “brought back in” again, but it must not be the idealized Weberian state that Theda Skocpol and her colleagues assumed.2 Rather, we need a more permeable , dynamic state to understand teachers’ politics, a state that is “staffed” by workers whose commitment...

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