Strategies for Implementing of Federal Instructions by Street-Level Bureaucrats: the Case of Teachers in Private and Public Schools

This paper focuses on the problem of how private and public school teachers implement state educational standards through the lens of M. Lipsky's theory of grassroots bureaucracy. The purpose of the research is to analyze teachers' strategies as grassroots bureaucrats during their professional practice, i.e., during their work with state educational standards. Since a bottom-up approach was chosen as the approach to researching the educational field of public policy, the study considers the implementation, non-implementation, or modification of standards at the local level, i.e., at the school, classroom level. An ethnographic approach was chosen for the research, which consists of in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The results of the study revealed teachers' strategies such as: categorizing, creaming, adaptation, and creating ties within the team. Moreover, the research also addressed the issue of identity and concluded that both public school teachers and private school teachers present a similar set of beliefs that correspond to a mixed identity of professional and frontline worker.