Necessary risk: addressing precarity by re-envisioning teaching and learning

ABSTRACT In Arizona, the expansion and elaboration of neoliberal educational policies over the past three decades in Arizona have placed public schools and the teaching profession in precarious positions. These challenges have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within this turbulent context, a school district in partnership with a college of education created and implemented a demonstration school aimed at re-envisioning how students learn and how teachers work. We analyse how district leaders responded to competing interests and pressures from the political environment and constituents as they designed, implemented, and expand this reform. We conclude by assessing how the features of the demonstration school, Arizona’s public schooling environment, and the uncertainties introduced by the pandemic provide affordances and challenges for the reform’s likelihood of survival.