Accountability and Troubling the Caring Ideal in the Classroom: A Call to Teacher Citizenry.

This work considers challenges facing the classroom caring ideal that Nel Noddings' ethics of care theory exemplifies. It is evident that conditions of a neoliberal regime of accountability, a contested Common Core, and high stakes testing undermine the plausibility of this vaunted relation in the classroom. Along these lines, market logics operating in K-12 education can further hinder the predominantly white teaching force from caring for their Black and brown students. Given the forced prioritization of care that accountability policies generate, I propose an alternate ethic of teacher citizenry, which is reasoned commitment to the educational well-being of each child. As a civic virtue, teacher citizenry encapsulates the responsibility that teachers have to themselves, students, and other democratic stakeholders in light of being co-citizens/citizens-in-the-making. Such considerations can inform critically reflexive determinations in a manner consistent with a democratic subject striving to exhibit civic virtues. The profession's public function acts a reasonable moral constraint that grounds its ethical norms within the political morality of participatory democracy. Teacher citizenry liberates the practitioner to make the moral calculus rather than merely a prudential one that failing to meet the ethics of care standard can compel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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