ABSTRACT
Women teaching at all levels of schooling from pre-kindergarten through university earn less than their male counterparts. The higher one looks up the educational ladder, the fewer women there are in leadership roles and in teaching roles. In the market-based school reforms prevalent since the early 1990s, gendered metaphors have intersected with business and military metaphors. Individual and group experience is positioned as radically disconnected from learning and knowing. Students experience the ill effects of poverty such as homelessness and hunger, systematic disinvestment in communities including joblessness, and an absence of public and private infrastructure and supports. They also experience the psychological effects of this poverty and political abandonment not just as hopelessness, depression, and despair but also as a restricted sense of agency. The organization of the workforce has to be transformed on both material and symbolic levels. In the humanities, performativity theory is one widely used critical theory of gender.
