Women School Teachers in New Times: Some Preliminary Reflections

Women, Schooling and Social Reproduction: Continuing Discomfort

The work and lives of women school teachers, much like the area of formal school education itself, has remained outside feminist inquiry in the Indian context. In the West, feminist discourses in education developed out of activist engagement of school teachers in the civil rights and women’s movements. Ideas of feminist pedagogy drew from experiences of mobilisation within feminist activism (Weiler, 1988). The lack of feminist engagement with education in the Indian context has remained an unfortunate absence in India, particularly given its critical engagement with virtually all other domains of women’s lives. While international debates on gender and development in the 1970s and 1980s opened up some space for productive engagements with the state on issues of women’s education, the transformative role of education in challenging patriarchal structures and relations has broadly been underestimated. In the absence of critical interventions by feminist scholars and activists, the field of gender and education in India has tended to ‘implicitly accept the welfare paradigm within which education has generally been located within statist discourses’ (Manjrekar and Saxena, 2012, p. 140). In recent times, we have seen academic engagement with issues of gender and school curriculum, initially as a political response to the conservative educational agenda of the Hindu Right and its reformulations of women’s education (as evidenced in the National Curriculum Framework, NCF, 2000), which extended to a deeper engagement with curriculum policy via the space offered by the processes underlying the formulation of the NCF 2005. The NCF 2005 substantively recognised the need to re-imagine school knowledge in relation to the social, economic and political contexts of children’s lives, and enabled women’s studies scholars and activists to come together to prepare a position paper on gender issues in school education that explicitly brought in contemporary feminist concerns. ² Nonetheless, it would be fair to say that important linkages between education and society—the role of the state, the social reproduction of class, caste and gender inequality, politics of knowledge, labour and sexuality—have remained unexplored areas within feminist discourse in the contemporary context (John, 2012; Manjrekar, 2003). As a result, in contrast to feminist inquiry in the West which has produced a large amount of research into the structures, ideologies and practices underlying the work of women teachers, the classed, raced and gendered dimensions of their work, and the impact of reforms on their practice (Apple, 1988; Connell, 1985; Dillabough, 1999; Walkerdine, 1990; Weiler, 1988), we have little insight into the gendered impact of education reforms on women teachers in India.

The contemporary moment in our understanding of teachers’ work in India, then, once again poses a key problematic in examining education from a feminist lens—to see the domain of education itself as part of wider processes of social and cultural reproduction. This attempt foregrounds one of the principal contradictions in women’s education. As Stromquist (1995) urges, it is important to engage with the ideological domains of education as a state apparatus. It is relatively easy, she says, for women to be educated without a feminist consciousness. The state (and family) can appropriate women’s education without addressing gender (or class/caste/race/ethnicity) so that ‘women become capable of making more and better contributions to the economy and to the family as presently constituted, while their increased schooling does not threaten the status quo, and ... the basic structures of ideological and material domination are retained and sustained’ (Stromquist, 1995, p. 445). In this sense, viewing teaching as gendered labour adds many dimensions to the analysis, such as, the realisation that when men are replaced by women in a profession (like teaching), the very character of the work changes due to altered power locations and regimes in the workplace, and also because women undertake paid/unpaid labour in more than one site—for women, the household (Apple, 1988). Walkerdine states that the lack of women’s power within larger structures of society, counterposed with the authority the teacher is expected to carry, constructs the woman teacher as an ‘impossible fiction’. The impossibility arises because of the gendered subjectivities of women teachers, trapping them ‘inside a concept of nurturance which holds them responsible for the freeing of each individual’ through education (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 19). This fiction is accommodated within the workplace of the school through the ideological deployment of their supposedly intrinsic capacities of care of the young. It is no wonder that the highest number of women teachers the world over are found at the primary and pre-primary levels.

Another source of discomfort arises from the relationship of women teachers to women’s education in general. School teaching constituted a significant site of employment for educated women in post-Independence India. The expansion of formal education provided spaces of employment for educated women while at the same time constraining their work as teachers to the care of the young. The entry of women teachers in large numbers was directly related to the expansion of access to the state’s project of universalisation of education, specifically its attempts to increase girls’ participation in education. This contradictory legacy—women seeking education and the public space of paid employment, but within the ‘caring profession’ of teaching, as instrumental to the developmental goal of gender parity—makes for some feminist discomfort. This history simultaneously reflects the place of education as an institutional site for patriarchal control over knowledge through restrictions on women’s subject choices at higher education levels—to Education over Sciences or the Humanities, for example—and hence the social reproduction of gender itself, while creating a space deemed legitimate for paid employment, that is, the school sector. As the work of Karuna Chanana suggests (Ahmad, 1979; Chanana, 2002, 2007), in the social institutions of family, marriage and the job market, higher education as a field of preparation for employment and (hence) the intersections of the private and public have been reconstituted for educated women in ways that research has not been able to capture.

The foregoing discussion sets a possible framework for questions we may ask in contemporary times, when neoliberal reforms are sweeping the landscape of education in India at a bewildering pace, redefining and reconfiguring institutional spaces and social relations within them. Shifts in policy and fundamental restructuring of the state’s role in education are critical to the ways in which neoliberal policies are impacting the lives of women employed in school teaching. As discussed earlier, the discourse of women teachers, casting as it does femininity and motherhood within the normative associations of care into the discourses of schooling as a space of paid employment, is problematic, since women also take ‘primary responsibility for the daily physical needs of household members, caring for young children, and nursing the sick, and make crucial contributions to the productive activity of the household’ (Laslett and Brenner, 1989, p. 386). Needless to say, these are areas of labour equally impacted by structural reforms. These associations, to be productive in terms of how we analyse the contemporary context, are not neatly encapsulated within private/public or reproduction/production dualisms but signal a vastly expanded set of possible issues which invite analysis. What is the larger political economy of education within which educated women are seeking jobs in the school sector? How have reforms reconfigured the social and economic character of schools, the school as a workplace and social relations within schooling systems? How are these discourses gendered? What are the new relations between education, family and gender that are impacting the lives of women teachers?

School Education and Women: Old Times and New

Women teachers inhabit dual spaces of social and societal reproduction: the home and the school. There is a seamless continuity attached to their identities at both institutional sites in terms of social reproduction, primarily indexed by the all-important category of care. These naturalised assumptions have been at the core of policies bringing women into teaching from the colonial period. The expansion of education and particularly the focus on the universalisation of education and getting girls to school led to policy focus on the employment of large numbers of women teachers. All policies from the early post-Independence period have stressed the necessity for recruiting women teachers, recommending incentives like preferential admissions to teacher training institutions, residential arrangements and a special allowance for women teachers posted in rural areas. Teacher training institutions exclusively for women were also set up, and several committees recommended that half of all teachers appointed should be women (Agrawal and Aggarwal, 1992).

The number of women teachers in India has been steadily increasing since 1950. Data from 2010–2011 indicates that women now make up 45 per cent of all teachers at the school level (DISE, 2010–2011, provisional tables). ³ More than a third of rural teachers are women; in urban areas, they make up around 65 per cent of all teachers (DISE, 2008–2009). This is the highest increase since the onset of reforms in the late 1980s, with successive nation-wide programmes aimed at universalisation, such as, Operation Blackboard (1987), the District Primary Education Programme (1994) and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) (2002), seeing several states earmark 50 per cent quotas for women teachers. There are wide variations in women’s representation in school teaching, and in a few states women now constitute half of all teachers (Samson and De, 2011). However, data also indicates that the percentage of women is high (more than 50 per cent) in private schools not aided by the state, and in contract teaching, both spaces of low paying and insecure employment. The majority of women teachers in all schools are in the age group 25–45 years (DISE, 2008–2009, analytical report). This has implications for a range of issues within their areas of work, such as, negotiations within regimes of power and authority in a system which tends to be dominated by men (women are under-represented at the levels of principal and head teacher), opportunities for career growth and entitlements to maternity and child care leave. Within the family, women of this age group have to deal with issues of marriage, child-bearing and childcare, household responsibilities and family migration.

Given the continuities in the gendered labour of women teachers, one could ask what is ‘new’ about our times. Educational policy and practice in the contemporary period is situated at the intersection of three distinct but overlapping discursive strands. These strands locate the market, the schools and the teacher in a dialectical relationship that provides a matrix to understand the work of women teachers in new times.

The first strand is the discourse of the market, and relates to the fundamental restructuring of national education systems to accommodate to the demands of global economic reforms. This includes instituting several market-driven transformations through a series of measures aimed at increasing ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’ in the education system. Along with these is the operation of the ideological frameworks and prescriptions of the ‘new managerialism’ and what has come to be characterised as New Public Management (Deem, 2001; Hood, 1991 cited in Jain, 2010). These involve the permeation of contemporary private management models into public institutions and work practices. Within the rhetoric of the market, the teacher is seen as a ‘service provider’ and the student as a ‘customer’, fundamentally altering this important relationship under the rubric of the commodification of education.

Broadly, reforms in Indian education have centred around certain key themes—the inefficiency of government schooling, parental choice, the need for the private sector to engage in ‘quality improvement’ through private–public partnerships (PPPs), and the economic rationale and desirability for LFP schools. Global corporate capital through transnational networks and local business interests have come together to define an entrepreneurial ethos for the expansion of school ‘markets’ based on notions of choice (see Nambissan and Ball, 2010 for a detailed discussion). Tragically the commodification of education has come at a time when a certain uneven and messy democratisation has come to characterise education in the country, as greater numbers of students from marginalised communities are accessing education and seeing in it possibilities of a life with dignity (Shah, 2012). The reach of the newer private unaided schools (which receive no grants from the state) and the LFP schools has vastly expanded over the past few years in urban, semi-urban and also rural areas. These schools largely cater to the poor and lower middle class. A survey carried out by the Institute for Human Development in 2005 reported that as many as 51 per cent of children in urban areas and 21 per cent in rural areas were enrolled in private unaided schools (cited in Nambissan, 2012, p. 52). Marketed to satisfy the demand for English-medium schooling, studies show that these ‘choice options’ are acting against the interests of socially marginalised communities, especially girls among them (Mehrotra and Panchamukhi, 2006). There is a strong logic advanced for the demand rather than the supply side of such schools (entrepreneurs are investing in these schools because people want them) in the wake of the inefficiency of the public school system. New private schools constitute an unregulated labour market where salaries are very low. Reports indicate that such schools are employing women on a fairly large scale.

The ideals and promise of privatisation of education is embodied in the private school teacher, while it is the government school teacher who represents the failure of the public school system. Jain succinctly sums up the situation:

[T]he figure of the regular government teacher as produced by contemporary discourses has come to be associated with unethical practices, lack of accountability to parents and local community, failure of children to reach expected levels of learning, frequent absence from school and politicisation. The explanations for this rent-seeking behavior range from conditions of employment that guarantee protection and permanency of tenure to their unionization and ability to act as a powerful lobby in comparison to weak and unorganized parents and children....In these accounts, the figure of the government school teacher comes to personify and represent the systemic failure and all the ills that have come to be associated with the public school system. (Jain, 2010, unpublished draft)

Associated with the efficiency argument are measures to contractualise teaching at the school level in the name of teacher accountability. The appointment of contract and para-teachers has been a feature of reforms since the 1990s (for a detailed discussion, see Govinda and Josephine, 2005; Kumar et al., 2001). In fact, it has been argued that decentralisation of appointments of teachers (making them accountable to parents and ‘community’) and contractualisation were themselves ways by which to curb teachers’ opposition to reforms (Govinda and Josephine, 2005). Para-teachers make up some 16 per cent of total teachers at the primary level (Kingdon and Sipahimalani-Rao, 2010), with salaries across the country averaging a little over a third of permanent teachers’ salaries. They are generally younger than permanent teachers, have higher educational qualifications but no professional qualifications to teach. At the present juncture, with a huge shortage of trained teachers to satisfy the demands of the Right to Education Act 2009, a National Mission for Teachers has been set up to meet the shortfall. ⁴ At the same time, high growth in private institutions is seeing large numbers of women entering teaching in low paying, contract employment. Low salaries for teachers, most often not even amounting to a living wage, are consistently justified by the state, donor agencies and private players on the grounds of cost-efficient achievement of universalisation.

Over the past few years, the impact of education reforms on school teachers has been debated between scholars who argue that social justice and equity necessarily have to be primary issues of concern for school policy in the Indian context, and ‘practitioners’ advocating for low-cost alternatives to deliver efficient quality education to the poor (see Jain and Saxena, 2010 and Nambissan, 2010 for an overview of arguments). There has also been attention on the increased administrative burden on teachers. School teachers, particularly government school teachers, have a range of duties to perform. These include house-to-house enumeration for the census, elections, pulse polio and economic surveys, in addition to preparation of monthly salary, disbursements, maintaining records of scholarships and other student grants, SSA funds, mid-day meals, and the regular maintenance of attendance and other data of students. In a study of Andhra Pradesh schools, Jos Mooij found teachers maintaining a minimum of 22 registers (Mooij, 2008). The obsession with supposedly ‘academic’ record-keeping is organically related to market compulsions underlying privatisation/globalisation as Kumar (1995, p. 2719) had pointed out several years back. Much of this alienating administrative work is punitively assessed and there is a great deal of stress because of the likelihood of making mistakes (Jain, 2010). There is considerable resentment among teachers and school heads at the lack of independent decision-making, or guidance, feedback and administrative support available for these duties. Thus, despite the euphoria over education reforms in terms of expansion and universalisation, teachers, burdened by a great deal of administrative work, are deeply alienated and demotivated (Mooij, 2008; Ramachandran et al., 2005). At the same time, they are blamed for their supposedly chronic absenteeism and lack of motivation to teach (Jain, 2010; Jain and Saxena, 2010). This state of affairs, with its wide-ranging repercussions on teaching and learning within public schools that cater to the poor, is created by the very state that points a finger at the lack of teacher ‘quality’ and professionalism.

Reforms in the education sector are affecting the work and selfidentity of all teachers through the institution of new managerial techniques to control their work. These measures construct a managerial ‘panopticism’ which regulates and monitors the everyday tasks of classroom teaching and assessment, making for a kind of ‘teacher performativity’ to meet the demands of reforms (Ball, 2003). ⁵ The impact on women teachers has been profound and unfortunately under-researched in the Indian context. The gendered impact has to be estimated in relation to another major axis of reforms: the discourse of ‘professionalism’ of teachers. Feminist scholars have pointed out how conceptions of the modern teacher have been dominated by ‘neoliberal rationalism’, within which teachers are seen as pivotal agents of educational reform. The success of ‘education in the market place’ which is seen as central to the transformation of the nation as a global economic force (Dillabough, 1999, p. 373) hinges on the idea of teacher professionalism, which in turn rests on the notion of the teacher as a rational instrumental actor. As Dillabough points out, such a formulation frames the state’s project of ‘reforming the public’s vision of the modern teacher’ (Ibid., p. 374). Teacher professionalism is characterised by a professional identity defined by the rational capacity to ‘behave competently’ in the name of student achievement and social and economic change. The instrumentality of the teacher as reform agent is based on ‘his /her role in subverting personal interest (political concerns, personal wisdom) to accord with objective standards of practice’ (Ibid., p. 375). This affirms Kirk’s assertion of the dominant approach with regard to women teachers in the larger development context being one of integration into existing gender and educational paradigms that separate body from mind and most particularly body from politics (Kirk, 2008, p. 24). Other scholars suggest that teacher professionalism is used by the state as a political device which gives the impression of liberation (collaboration, empowerment) but simultaneously de-skills and de-professionalises teachers to the point of exploitation (Lawn and Ozga, 1981, cited in Dillabough, 1999, p. 376).

In recent times, upgrading teacher competence and skills have included the incorporation of gender as a special input in in-service training of government school teachers. Teachers attend compulsory gender training sessions as part of the mandatory training of 20 days under the national education programme, the SSA. These trainings are directed towards creating an understanding of gender towards bringing more girls into school. Within this circumscribed mandate, one sees very little reference to the category of power, although there is ample reference to empowerment as an outcome of education. Often seen by teachers as yet another imposition from above, these trainings make little reference to the real conditions of work for women, gender relations and discriminations in the school, or to possibilities for critical engagement with gender ideologies in textbooks. Studies of women as teachers tend to fall back into the logic of their instrumental role by stressing the need for gender inputs into pre- and in-service training. Experiences of training, even those designed along gender-sensitive lines, bring out the problems women face in travelling distances, facing hostility from men in their schools and in their families, and the ephemerality of the concept of empowerment (Stacki, 2002). Yet, women teachers often do express the need for more inputs, particularly at the level of the classroom, in enhancing girls’ participation, something that conventional trainings rarely address.

With a narrow focus on gender parity rather than any substantive orientation to issues of gender equity and social justice, these one-day mandatory ‘gender trainings’ often get pared down to positing the ideology of ‘nari shakti’ (women’s power) or ‘nari jagriti’ (women’s awakening) as a limited ideal, as opposed to ‘nariwadi’ (feminism) which is considered far too subversive and unrelated to the aims of education (Manjrekar, 2004). The panacea that gender training is imagined to offer as a response to structural inequities of gender faced by teachers as well as students is challenged by the absence of discussion around issues of pedagogy. Hiring and training women teachers and expecting that feminist pedagogy will follow is a fallacy. Given the antipathy around adopting any stance that could be seen as socially destabilising, the state-mandated training reduces discussion of pedagogy to the absurd theme of ‘girl-friendly classrooms’. From a feminist standpoint, we have to recognise that teachers have also been subjects of authoritarian and disembodied ways of learning, and socialised into prevailing gender ideologies (NCERT, 2006), so to expect them to be feminist pedagogues is far-fetched. At the same time, it is interesting to note that recent curriculum reforms, which explicitly speak of the engaged teacher and the co-construction of knowledge in classrooms, steps that could enhance debates on possibilities of feminist pedagogy, have tended to disallow the voice and agency of the teacher in the NCF 2005 (Batra, 2005) or been blind to the gendered outcomes of the new ‘child-centred’ models of teaching and assessment that re-insert the maternal into the ‘profession’ (Sriprakash, 2011).

Women Teachers in New Times

Contemporary discourses of teacher ‘failure’ have been central to the restructuring of education in the era of global reforms. As discussed earlier, women teachers have for long been instrumentally deployed by educational policy as agents of educational development; in recent documents we find that their assumed pliability and passivity makes them preferable to men as they are seen as not ‘indulging in politics’ (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2001).

The contexts of global economic restructuring and the increasing vulnerabilities of the poor and lower classes in India are seen to have an effect on the educational participation of children from these sections (Hirway, 2009, cited in Nambissan, 2010). These contexts are reframing the work of women in the household and in schools. Dominant cultural codes of power associated with education (based on class and caste which privilege the mental—manual dualism) may find teachers baulking at the suggestion that they identify as ‘workers’; however, it can be argued that proletarianisation in terms of de-skilling, erosion of autonomy and increase of management control has occurred in the school as a workplace. The current imagination of a ‘reformed’ education system within the contexts described in the previous section—delegitimation of the state sector, large-scale privatisation, contractualisation and control of teachers’ work—has distinct gendered dimensions. Taken together, these can be seen as validating Walkerdine’s ‘impossible fiction’ of the woman school teacher, on the one hand, and providing an argument for women’s entry into teaching as it becomes more proletarianised, on the other. This is also an area to examine in terms of social reproduction in contemporary times.

Studies of women’s own priorities and experiences show that they have to deal with constant expectations of increasing their stakes in the social reproduction of their own families as well as perform their roles of bringing children into their schools, and ensuring their survival there, especially for girls. Studies of women teachers note that they take to teaching because it is considered respectable, the spaces of education are presumed to be feminised spaces, teaching is a natural extension of their mothering capacities, but most important, it is permissible within the demands placed by families, especially the matrimonial family. Teaching is considered to be an ideal option for educated women to earn and supplement household income. It allows time for household responsibilities, its cycle follows that of school going children in terms of vacations, and training credentials are a portable asset helpful in times of migration of one’s spouse and family (Indumathi and Vijaysimha, 2011; Kirk, 2008). What we see then is a particular class- and caste-based naturalisation of motherhood and domesticity as the basis to bring in women as part of a developmental imperative, while for women who can seek education the operation of a certain logic of ‘convenience’ to seek employment in schools.

It is important to note that teachers do not constitute a homogenous category and that these experiences in the contemporary context are differentially distributed across the new stratifications within the schooling sector. Indumathi and Vijaysimha’s (2011) study of 50 middle class teachers in Bangalore city demonstrates marked differences between women teachers employed in government schools and those in private schools. The stability offered by job tenure, decent salaries and benefits in the government sector impacts the ways in which women can negotiate within their families in applying for these jobs, retaining them through family migration, acquiring further qualifications, seeking promotions and meeting the various demands of work, such as, trainings, time for preparation and assessments, all of which require some degree of family support in terms of housework and child care. Private school teachers, on the other hand, face instability of work, lower salaries and no benefits, which means that they are far more prone to breaks in work. Low salaries mean that their labour is seen as expendable by their families and they often cannot draw on family support or negotiate to stay on in their jobs when their families migrate to other areas. In both cases, women appear to have internalised the logic of their space within school teaching, justifying it as important to build children as future citizens, which leads the researchers to posit the woman teacher between Walkerdine’s ‘impossible fiction’ and the possibility of a fulfilling life (Indumathi and Vijaysimha, 2011).

Women teachers dominate recruitment in unaided private and LFP schools, working on insecure contracts, with very low pay and unregulated hours of work. There is little data about recruitment patterns and work conditions or the social backgrounds of women employed in this sector. At the other end of the spectrum, the entire domain of elite private schools, a sector that now caters to the international education market (the IB and IGCSE) ⁶ have also remained completely outside any kind of inquiry, largely because of the impossibility of researchers gaining entry into these spaces. The high fees of these schools, the logic of elite status production for a globalised higher education market (and information from their websites) would lead us to assume that women employed here come from upper middle class and upper caste backgrounds. Interactions with teachers from these schools and preliminary inquiry into the gendered regimes of one such ‘premier’ school managed by a corporate house in a major city suggest a high degree of feminisation at all levels, with women teachers coming from upper class/upper caste families, typically married to men employed in the corporate sector. Since this was a much sought-after school by the city’s upper classes, it would be reasonable to assume that its features—discriminatory salary structures in favour of men, regulation of women’s sexuality (through dress codes), explicit promotion of the student as customer (justifying the silence around sexual harassment which was actually experienced by several teachers) and an administrative structure that mirrors corporate systems with the human resource manager the key gatekeeper to management—appear to be the principal features of such schools (Luthra, 2012).

Insights from these studies provoke us to think of how the implications of these contemporary realities are impacting wider gender relations. New forms of gender regimes are being forged in schools. An interesting finding from both Indumathi and Vijaysimha’s as well as Luthra’s studies is that with few promotional avenues for teachers in the private sector, as well as low salaries, men employed in these schools largely undertake teaching as stopgap employment or to bring in supplementary income. On the other hand, higher administrative positions in all systems are generally occupied by men. Within the government school sector there are somewhat clearer connections we can make. A large part of the increase in women teachers in government schools has been attributed to large-scale contractualisation in the post-reform era. Contractualisation is reshaping the relationships between gender, caste and teaching in ways that suggest sharper inquiry. In some states, over the decade 1996–2006, it has been seen that in both rural and urban areas fewer upper caste men were entering contract positions in school teaching, which are being increasingly occupied by men from the middle castes and upper caste women who, it would appear, are willing to work for lower wages and without long-term security of employment (Samson and De, 2011). ⁷

The insights we gather from the limited set of studies suggest that the situation for women school teachers in the contemporary context is marked by stratification and diversity across social identities and shifting realities under globalisation, both within the education domain as well as in society and the economy. Interactions with teachers in Mumbai’s municipal schools indicate that government school teachers are increasingly being faced with ‘competing’ models of ‘efficiency’ and ‘professionalism’ offered by the many PPP-managed interventions in schools. Even as many municipal schools are constantly facing or under threat of closure, being seen as ineffective due to falling enrolments and to make room for other reconfigurations of space and population within the city, they are subject to new measures of control and regulation. Young women with DEd training are being recruited only to find themselves largely carrying out administrative tasks within PPP-managed schools, while older teachers are struggling to manage enrolments and the fraught conditions of their students. Within these new regimes, consciously instituted by global financial institutions and local corporate bodies, municipal school teachers are increasingly finding themselves constructed as lesser teachers.

The context of contemporary Mumbai presents interesting insights into how public education is being recast to suit its refashioning as a global city through massive re-development projects. Corporate and international finance agencies assert their domination over the policy-making related to the municipal schools, pushing for more PPP models and restructuring of the school system under frameworks of social entrepreneurship and corporate philanthropy, in an environment that is seen as conducive (DASRA, 2010). Many of these new projects employ ‘community’ women, who have some degree of school education, and who are given in-service training, on salaries nowhere comparable to government salaries. Even as the contours of the city and the nature of its labour force and labour processes are changing, working class families who send their children to these schools are being increasingly pushed to the margins physically and metaphorically. Biographies of the schools and teachers bear witness to the earlier impact of the textile mill strike of the mid-1980s up to these present developments. Even though teachers—many of whom have memories of these displacements right within their homes—send their own children to private schools, they see their work as related to creating some sort of mechanism of mobility for the children they teach. The present reforms dampen and even delegitimise these orientations towards the urban poor.

Conclusion: A Search for More

The neoliberal onslaught on teachers has come at a historical moment when more and more women are accessing education and the possibilities of paid employment. Statistics on growing numbers of women teachers hide stories of immense struggles in familial, educational and work spheres to gain an identity and a degree of power within new forms of patriarchal control in all these domains.

There is clearly a need to look at how reforms in the education sector are impacting women teachers’ sense of personal and professional identity. For this we would need to examine the influence of wider economic reforms on social/gender relations and social organisation of work in schools as well as households in different contexts, changes in family strategies to accommodate new dimensions of work, and ‘new’ dimensions to women’s struggles and negotiations. As discussed in this article, evidence of the gendered aspects of the reform process in education have been troubling. As Batra (2005) has pointed out, while the agency of the child as learner has been articulated in the progressive turn associated with the NCF 2005, the reform process has persisted in denying teachers their place. She raises the important issue of whether, in questioning the dominant narrative of education as transmission of information, the notion of the teacher as a passive agent of state-instituted reform can remain unchallenged. New curriculum frameworks post NCF 2005 are constituting the woman teacher in specifically maternal ways (Sriprakash, 2011). At the same time, there are other dimensions of social reproduction and education that we can expect to see in times to come. Some studies, for example, have shown that parents may prefer LFP schools for their daughters in order to meet the demands of a changed marriage market (Srivastava, 2006).

Discourses of quality and ‘professionalism’ have instituted new regimes of power. There is increased administrative and non-academic work burden on teachers, stricter regimes of surveillance, monitoring and regulation, all supposedly in the interest of student needs. Teachers report a lack of autonomy and alienation from the larger project of education, making for the construction of the ideal teacher as a ‘compliant agent of the developmental state’. In a recent insightful commentary on the impact of neoliberal reforms on teachers, Kumar (2011, p. 38) says:

One consequence of this regime is a considerable reduction in the time that teachers can now spend with children. In countries like India, where a whole socio-economic stratum previously kept out of the education system is now able to send children to school, the bureaucratisation of teachers’ work and routine imposes on them a severe constraint of time spent directly with children. The children who constitute the first-generation of school-goers in their families need more, not less time, with the teacher. The problem is further compounded by the fact that the teachers’ own social background is going through diversification. The new teacher needs both time-sustained training, and institutional space to negotiate and adjust her own gender, class and caste identity to perform her professional role in the classroom which often contrasts with her role in the family.

In examining the lives and work of women school teachers in present times, we can see the tension between the power of institutions, which have been created under particular historical, economic and social conditions, and the will of individuals who may be in opposition to those forces, and who themselves can influence the present structure of the institutions. This is the emancipatory promise of education, and one that feminists recognise and affirm. We clearly need more work in the area to be able to conceptualise such a change.