Unequal Work in Unequal Schools: Working in NYC Middle Schools in an Era of Accountability

• Main Author: Quinn, Johanna S
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2017
• Subjects: Sociology
• ISBN: 9780355230475; 035523047X

My dissertation examines K-12 schools not from the perspective of student outcomes but rather in their role as workplaces. By focusing on the understudied paraprofessional staff, this dissertation reveals the processes that stratify school employees. My dissertation uses the case of two high-performing, racially-diverse New York City (NYC) schools to observe workplace interactions. Using the results of 16-months of fieldwork in two middle school communities, I examine the histories, experiences, and perspective of paraprofessional staff. In doing so, I ask how caring responsibilities are distributed throughout the school, as well as how the complexity of work tasks compares to the ways jobs are valued and rewarded. Beginning with the historical construction of the paraprofessional occupational category, I study how the concept of the “skilled” paraprofessional has shifted and narrowed overtime. I then compare how paraprofessional work is organized in two school organizations, one hierarchal and one collaborative. I find that administrator’s differing attention to space, schedules, and evaluation impact how much interaction paras have with other adults during their workday, and the amount of effort they must extend on routine tasks. I next take a closer look at the relationships between teachers and paraprofessionals and discover that paras are relegated to relational, clerical, and reproductive tasks. Finally, I examine accounts from paras about their career goals, which reveals that they prefer to have jobs that involved social-emotional and relational work that went far beyond teaching. My study builds on workplace stratification research by extending the lens to schools. Overall, I find that women perform additional relational work with students and coworkers and that workers of color contribute “racial pride work” that takes considerable effort but is uncompensated. I argue that schoolwork is premised on a gendered and racialized organizational structure: while school employees are rewarded for solely academic outcomes, they are in essence expected to provide much more in terms of interpersonal connections, nurturing, and engendering a sense of racial pride. As a result, students do not always receive the care they need, and the development and career trajectory of workers not directly involved in academic instruction are not prioritized.