Chapter 15: Education’S Handmaids?: The Role of the Teacher in the Age of Accountability

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), educators are experiencing an increasing lack of autonomy and individuality within their classrooms. Because of the quantitative push by politicians and policymakers for measurable results, markers of progress, and “accountability,” teachers are increasingly being expected to use what some have called teacher-proof pedagogy and scripted curriculum rather than strategies and curriculum they select and develop themselves (Giroux, 1988; St. Pierre, 2004). Teachers are becoming functionaries of education instead of creative, autonomous professionals who shape their own pedagogy and curriculum.

In this chapter we argue that the dystopian handmaids in Margaret Atwood’s (1986)The Handmaid’s Tale can be used to understand the current and potential ramifications of the loss of teacher autonomy under NCLB through a feminist poststructural appropriation of Foucault’s (1982) pastoral power. We find that Foucault’s concept of pastoral power offers an analytical framework that illuminates how seemingly “caring” and benign governmental intentions bring increased surveillance, regulation, and normalization to control the “docile bodies” of those for whom they express care and concern. We will draw the parallels between how the discourses of accountability and security operate as benign and “caring” forces through which the technologies of “high standards” under NCLB, as do those of “women’s safety” within The Handmaid’s Tale, compel compliance and ultimately decrease autonomy and individuality for their respective subjects.