Anthropology

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Busy Work, Bad Blood, Test Scores & Tenure How and Why New York State’s APPR Policy Reform is Found Ineffective by Educators
(2018) Anderson, Emily; Saleh, Zainab
In a rural area of Upstate New York, public educators are infuriated with the state of their profession. Many aspects of creative and thoughtful instruction have been abolished through public education reform. Beginning with President Ronald Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk,” political attempts to increase the quality of public education have resulting in a commodification of learning. This thesis analyses New York State’s Annual Professional Performance Review policy reform, adopted in 2012, as a result of historical trends towards incorporating neoliberal ideologies into public education. Specifically, I engage with the teachers and administrators being pushed into a system in which they become uniform producers and collectors of data. Although the goal of APPR is to increase the quality of learning and student achievement in New York State, educators are the target of the policy reform, and that has led to significant impacts on their occupation. Through a historical lens of state and national level education policy, this thesis documents the 4 main ways APPR has affected 8 educators in Upstate New York: as an excess consumption of time; as a subjective process of evaluation; as an inaccurate use of student achievement scores; and lastly, as an excuse for unjust teacher termination.