Time, gearing, and impoverished welfare in primary schools: How an overheated public sector enrols teachers in toxic social debt

This chapter analyses the working conditions for Danish school teachers through a systemic perspective on public reforms and austerity during the last two decades. It argues that after the 2008 Financial Crisis, toxic debt speculation was rolled from the financial sector to the steering of the public sector. I define debt philosophically as ‘quantifiable promises about the future’, and toxic as ‘unsustainable and self-accelerating’. The key argument is that attempting to steer social systems via financial growth tools, such as gearing, engenders impoverishment instead. The chapter thus analyses time poverty by considering it in a larger frame of toxic steering practices that fail to consider the ontological differences between financial growth and social welfare. Concretely, it shows how toxic debt occurs via systematic underfinancing of budgets, political reforms, technological innovations, and revised work organisations. Resource optimisation is habitually overestimated, and resource expenditure is underestimated. Managers and employees are enrolled in a game of hiding, excusing, pretending, postponing, or hopelessly struggling to keep promises that cannot be kept with the existing resources. They and their professional services are impoverished, and their ability to exercise robust responsibility and alignment of expectations erodes.