Protecting teacher identity at the expense of students who exhibit low effort

Educators’ perceptions of student behavior play a critical role in determining both immediate academic success and long-term educational trajectories for learners. However, within globally pervasive neoliberal frameworks that tie teacher efficacy to standardized outcomes, educators – often reflexively – defend their professional identities by attributing non-normative behavior and underachievement to deficient student and family practices, beliefs, and values, rather than looking to their own instructional techniques, biased conceptions of effective teaching and learning, or broad systemic inequities. Situating itself within critical scholarship on teacher identity, discourse, and meritocratic beliefs, this critical discourse analysis investigates how educators call on narratives of effort, merit, and individual accountability to form and reinforce educator and student identities that preserve teachers’ image as effective, moral professionals. This study contributes to the field by exposing these educational identities and the deficit discourse used to reify them. Ultimately, this work offers actionable pathways for school leaders and educators to dismantle restrictive definitions of student ‘effort’ and ‘achievement’, reframe professional morality, and foster the mindset shift necessary to better serve students who exhibit effort in non-normative ways, while also providing potential entry points for future research.