If perfect fits were achievable between social relations and psychic reality, between self and language, our subjectivities and our societies would be closed. Completed. Finished. Dead. Nothing to do. No difference. No learning (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 34). This paper examines how current educational policy positions, and shapes futures - for students and teachers - in terms of failure that have disturbing implications for the profession and for education more broadly. The paper’s central criticism is that policy disavows the priority of the constitutive gap of the subject and instead establishes education’s telos of closing gaps. Specifically, the paper situates the failure articulated by educational policy within a semantics of achievement that positions failure as an end or consequence of correctly operating policies. The paper considers how Education's ‘will to closure’ has become a primary site of a striving to collapse the teacher and their work into a singular entity and through this closure is able to destine (not only) teachers to failure. The trope of closing gaps is emblematic of a failure that arrives at the end, after achievement has been measured. Specifically, education policies across international contexts define what a teacher is and determines their end according to measures of effectivity (F Tony Carusi, 2017; Larsen, 2010), perhaps captured best in the ubiquitous policy statement that the teacher is the most important factor in raising student achievement. Such statements instrumentalize the teacher as ‘the most important’ means toward the end of closing the achievement gaps between races, ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic classes. Following this examination, the paper draws from psychoanalytic theories that consider failure in the genesis of the subject, including philosophical ideas from political (Laclau, 2005, 2014; Tønder & Thomassen, 2005) and psychoanalytic (Lacan, 1977) theories to challenge the renderings of failure assumed and performed by policy. Taking seriously the philosophical notion of a void, gap or lack in the subject and in the world, neither can be made whole, or “dead” as Ellsworth writes. While notions of a gap to be closed in education policies understand failure as an end for teachers, as well as schools and students, this paper concludes by reconsidering the role of the teacher that attends to the beginning of failure. Instead of conceiving failure as something to be disavowed as policy does, the constitutive failure of the subject becomes a condition of possibility for educational relations to take place.

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