Human Capital Theory and Shifting Perceptions of Teachers in the United States

Abstract

In February 2011, citizens of the state of Wisconsin were deeply surprised to hear that the state’s new governor had introduced legislation taking away collective bargaining rights from public workers, including teachers, and asked those workers to take major cuts in benefits. The same budget bill took hundreds of millions of dollars away from education. Many Wisconsin teachers reported being shocked—not only by the changes in their salaries and benefits but also by the hostility they felt—both from the Republican lawmakers who proposed and voted for the legislation and from friends and family members who called them and posted on their Facebook pages telling them that teachers were doing a poor job and that teachers and their unions were a major cause of the “underperformance” or “failure” of US public schools.