Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Scott, James
Abstract
Scholars, policymakers, and theoreticians have long debated the purpose of education and schooling. For all the articulations of what schools reproduce and what should be their purpose, political theorization rarely departs from what is endemic to schools and has long been reproduced by them: alienation. Whatever the stated or longed for purposes of schooling, these missions cannot be achieved if students, teachers, and other constituents of schools are alienated within the labor process of schooling. Thus, this dissertation asks: What form of political agency enables the redress of the entwined alienation of teachers and students in schools? What are its ramifications for how schools should be governed? And what is the role of teachers’ unions in seeking and sustaining this redress?In Who Governs Schools?: Alienation and Participatory Democracy in New Haven Public Education I start from alienation as relating to a focal concept that I term the labor process of schooling. I define alienation as a psychosocial experience linked to institutional structures with Melvin Seeman's named dimensions of (a) powerlessness; (b) meaninglessness; (c) normlessness; (d) cultural estrangement; (e) self-estrangement; and (f) social isolation. In the process, I theorize what I term the entwined alienation of students and teachers. Through the counterposed historical case studies of New York City teachers’ unionism and New Haven teachers’ unionism, respectively, I theorize “militant white professionalism” and “militant democratic professionalism” as historically-grounded forms of political agency as attempts to redress such alienation in the labor process of schooling. More specifically, I contrast New York City’s Teachers’ Guild and later United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in the explosive conflict between a majority-white teachers' union and communities of color in Ocean Hill-Brownsville over the matter of “community control” to that of the New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) in its anomalous labor-community alliance in pursuit of building a school district system of participatory democratic schooling in the form of joint teachers’-community control. Beyond simply examining and theorizing alienation in the labor process of schooling as it occurs within the traditional hierarchical school structure, I also examine New Haven’s formerly participatory democratic public school High School in the Community (HSC). From 1970 to 2015 HSC was the longest active teacher-run public school in the United States. I examine HSC's rise and fall in terms of the redress of alienation and thereafter the reemergence of alienation within a participatory democratic labor process of schooling. Through interweaving a chapter-by-chapter historical narrative with a chapter-by-chapter form of theorization, I arrive at provisional conclusions regarding participatory democratic school governance and the role of teachers' unions in building and sustaining the former.
Recommended Citation
Kolokotronis, Alexander, "Who Governs Schools?: Alienation and Participatory Democracy in New Haven Public Education" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1229.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1229
