Confronting neoliberal education policies and COVID-19: Convergent trajectories of public school teacher resistance in Brazil and the United States

This paper uses comparative ethnography to examine the global spread of neoliberal education policies and public school teacher resistance to them in Brazil and the United States. Initially focused on teacher responses to São Paulo’s Programa Educação Compromisso (Commitment to Education Program), the study was expanded into a cross-national comparison with US education reforms that Brazilian elites promoted as successful and imitable models. The aim of the study thus became to compare local forms of teacher resistance to elite-driven global policy models. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic exploded between rounds of data collection, it created both new challenges and opportunities for the comparative ethnographic study. The pandemic introduced practical constraints that prevented a traditional ethnographic comparison, but it also made more visible the crucial role of public schools in guaranteeing the basic rights of school communities, and revealed how teachers’ collective responses to a global health crisis were informed by prior educational policy reforms. Ultimately, the paper argues that both elite-driven policy mobility and the global pandemic contributed to convergent trajectories in distant and historically distinct public school systems, imposing new challenges on teachers but also galvanizing similar practices of resistance and community engagement.