The primary and secondary education sector of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may provide insight into the effects of marketization of schools. While arguments in favor of the marketization of schools often focus on finances, student achievement metrics or the perceived benefits of competition, teachers and their role in schools are not given proper attention as part of the conversation. The marketization of schools may change the character of teachers’ work as well as teachers’ perceptions of the experiences at work. This article argues for the importance of considering the experiences of teachers in marketized systems, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods to understand teachers’ work.

Teachers’ experiences are often given little consideration when education policy is analyzed. Ball (2012) argues that teachers, staff, and students may be written out of policy and denied visibility as key components of how policy occurs in schools. However, teachers’ experiences at schools and their perceptions of their work are important for understanding schools a workplace (Connell, 1985). The achievement of students is undeniably mediated by teachers and the effects of efficiency and accountability measures are primarily experienced by teachers. Hargreaves (1999) demonstrates that the conditions of teachers’ work is inextricably linked to the experience of students, as teachers’ experiences affect the quality of their work in the classroom. Viewing the outcomes for schools or students as separate from the work of teachers is, at best, ignorant of how schools operate. At worst, it is a way to obscure the relationship between student achievement and the experiences of teachers at work. Bullough and Hall-Kenyon (2011) argue that without an understanding of teachers’ experiences in schools, “even the most well-intentioned of school reform efforts is likely to fail” (p. 128). Teachers accounts of their work provide a necessary perspective on the challenges of the system that may not be visible otherwise. To investigate how marketization is affecting teacher experiences in schools, we must ask the teachers about the conditions of their work to shed light on how policy is enacted at the school level in a market-oriented system.

This study was a part of a mixed-methods investigation of teachers’ experiences in marketized systems. Teachers working in for-profit international schools were interviewed. Questionnaire items were developed based around themes of the initial findings of marketization, control, buffering, and fulfillment. Then, teachers in the UAE were surveyed to find quantitative patterns in their experiences. The qualitative data collection included interviews conducted with a psychosocial approach (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000), the aim of which was eliciting personal stories about teachers’ experiences at work. The interview participants were prompted to tell stories about their work with prompts such as “Tell me about your work,” “What is a normal day like for you?,” “What are your favorite/least favorite parts of your work?,” and sometimes included follow-up questions based on their answers. The data from the interviews was analyzed through content analysis which guided the creation of questionnaire items. The questionnaire items were analyzed with Mokken analysis (Sijtsma & van der Ark, 2017) and Rasch analysis (Rasch, 1960; Bond & Fox, 2015). Mokken analysis was used as an initial exploratory analysis as part of instrument development. Rasch analysis was used as the next step in determining the item hierarchy describing the relationship between the items. This kind of analysis of the responses makes it possible to find patterns of experiences and the prevalence of certain aspects of teachers’ work in the UAE. The analysis does not simply report the percentage of agreement with each item but considers the range of experiences of respondents and an individual’s range of answers. The mixed-methods approach allowed for teachers’ experiences to guide a quantitative analysis of teachers’ work in the UAE and to find larger patterns that what could be investigated in a purely qualitative study.

The findings from the quantitative study show that across types of schools, teachers in the UAE experience the direct effects of a marketized school system and the indirect effects that influence interactions at their workplaces. Scale 1 was found to measure the degree to which a school is market-oriented and Scale 2 described the indirect effects of policy. This was found to be similar to Ball’s (2012) idea of “second order effects” of how clusters of policies change schools as places to work and learn in. The hierarchy of items demonstrates that teachers in the UAE experience the direct effects of a marketized school system and separately experience the indirect effects in their interactions at work. The indirect effects demonstrate that teachers feel threats to their professional judgment, hierarchical relationships, and social pressures related to marketization. These “micro-physics of power” (Ball, 2013) show the patterns of how many small experiences contribute to an overall work experience in a school. This research provides an entry point into the experiences of teachers in schools in the UAE. Across diverse types of schools, the marketized approach affects teachers’ work in patterned ways. Identifying the patterns, practices or policies within schools that create these conditions for teachers is the first step in understanding how teachers’ experiences in schools in the UAE can be improved. With knowledge of how teachers experience their work, reforms can be made considering how teachers have been affected by previous policies

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