Educational Leave Policy and Evaluation Documents as Mechanisms of Control: A Foucaldian Power Analysis

Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist perspective informs the purpose of my research, which is to critique the lived effects of policy as discourse on educators’ autonomy. For this dissertation, I critiqued state-level educational policies and documents surrounding staff attendance and teacher evaluation through a “thinking with theory” analysis (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023) that puts to work Foucault’s theories of power, discourse, and subjectivity. My sources for analysis are 1) the North Carolina Educator Effectiveness System and its templates and documents (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, n.d.-c) and 2) North Carolina Public Schools Benefits and Employment Policy Manual (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 2023b) for staff. I “think with” Foucault, policies, documents, and my own professional experiences in order to produce knowledge about how educators are controlled through discourse and relations of power that circulate among state-level regulatory documents and policies. Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power, discourse, and subjectivity allowed me to analyze and critique policy and guidelines used to control educators. Much of this control occurs invisibly through discourse and disciplinary power; a goal of my research is to highlight the lived effects of such. Lived effects of disciplinary power include the ways in which policy contributes to the creation of docile bodies in educators and further produces limits to subjectivity. My analysis seeks to examine how policy functions as discourse. Policy as discourse produces expectations that generate controlling norms that govern what a competent, caring educator looks like.<p></p>