The history of Estonian education in the second half of the 20th century has been characterised by a 50 year period of Soviet totalitarianism, followed by attempts of democratization and increasing choices from the end of the 1980s and the establishment of neoliberal governance at the turn of the century. The aim of this paper is to investigate how these fundamental changes in ideology and educational governance have influenced teachers and their professional roles in general education. More precisely, the research question concerns the change in teacher autonomy and control of teachers’ work and how teachers have reacted on changes related to the “neoliberal turn” The theoretical framework involves the neoinstitutional theory which sees education as deeply embedded in social and political environments. According to this theory educational practices are a reflection of rules, beliefs and conventions characteristic to a wider institutional environment while carried by three institutional pillars: regulative, normative and cultural/cognitive (Scott, 2001). Simultaneously, the changing views of teacher professionalism from restricted to extended (Webb et al., 2004) have to be taken into consideration. While restricted professionalism interprets teachers’ role as implementers of policies designed by others, the extended professionalism implies the changing role of teachers from curriculum implementers to curriculum developers. In order to answer the research questions three sources of data were analysed: teacher interviews, curricula and Estonian teachers’ newspaper “Õpetajate Leht” from 1996-2010. The interviews were analysed through content analysis while historical discourse analysis (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) was used to examine the curricula and newspapers. The main findings indicate that teachers were struggling with their changing role from curriculum implementers to curriculum developers. Furthermore, the Soviet obsession with gathering quantitative data in assessing school quality and the neoliberal commitment to school accountability through benchmarking and competition shows certain similarities

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