The Social Construction Of Teachers and the Teaching Profession Among Florida State Legislators from 1984 to 2015

Public officials at the state level currently are called upon to create, evaluate, and
implement policies that assess the effectiveness of teacher performance and hold teachers
accountable for student achievement. Therefore, understanding the social construction of
the teaching profession among those public officials is crucial to understanding the
impact of the policy agenda on the work of teachers as well as being essential to
exercising influence on the policy process itself. This study was an analysis of legislation
regarding teacher accountability in an effort to provide insight into how the Florida State
Legislature socially constructs the teaching profession. This study used a qualitative
methodology to place teachers, as a group, in Schneider and Ingram’s (1993) typology of
target populations and made use of historical analysis to trace the changes that have
occurred in the social construction of teachers during the period from 1984-2015. In
doing so, it found teachers are negatively constructed with a positive power component, correspondingly labeled contenders, on Schneider and Ingram’s typology. Ultimately, the
effect of the pressures placed upon teachers has been to create projections of ongoing
teacher shortages and to discourage potential candidates from pursuing the profession.