I have been noticing something in the way AI tools market themselves to educators. The pitch varies in specifics, but the underlying structure is almost always the same: teachers are overwhelmed, teachers are burning out, teachers are leaving, and this product can help by reducing workload, automating grading, generating lesson plans. The teacher’s suffering is the given, and the tool is the response.

What has been sitting with me lately, as I have been rereading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, is how completely these pitches accept the conditions they claim to address. The burnout, the 49-hour weeks, the expanding scope of what a teacher is expected to do with fewer resources and less autonomy: all of it is treated as the fixed landscape that the product must navigate. The landscape itself is never questioned. It is not presented as the result of political choices or funding decisions or a particular way of organizing schools that could have gone differently. It is presented as reality, the way things are, the permanent weather of the profession.

The Atmosphere You Stop Noticing

Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, published in 2009, argues that capitalism has moved beyond ideology into something more like atmosphere. It is not that people believe capitalism is the best system. It is that most people cannot imagine a coherent alternative. The famous formulation, borrowed from Fredric Jameson, is that it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The system does not need to be defended on its merits because its existence feels as natural and permanent as weather.

Fisher was writing about economics and politics broadly, but he kept returning to education as one of his primary examples. He was a lecturer in a Further Education college in the UK, and the conditions he described there will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has worked in American public schools: expanding bureaucratic demands, performance metrics that measure the representation of teaching rather than teaching itself, and a pervasive sense among workers that things are broken but cannot be fixed.

What struck me rereading the book recently is how precisely Fisher’s framework describes the way we talk about teaching in the United States right now. We have developed what you could call a teaching realism, a set of conditions so deeply naturalized that they function not as problems to be solved but as facts to be managed. Low pay, expanding responsibilities, emotional exhaustion, loss of professional autonomy, bureaucratic surveillance: these are not treated as the outcomes of specific policies and funding decisions. They are treated as inherent features of the profession itself.

That naturalizing is worth paying attention to, because it determines which questions we allow ourselves to ask and which ones we skip over entirely.

Business Ontology in the Classroom

One of Fisher’s central concepts is what he calls “business ontology,” the framework in which purposes and objectives are understood exclusively in business terms. When business ontology takes hold of a public institution, the institution stops being able to articulate its value in any language other than the market’s. Healthcare becomes a set of billable outcomes. Education becomes a pipeline for workforce readiness.

This has happened so thoroughly in American education that it barely registers as a choice anymore. The language of schools is now the language of business: outcomes, deliverables, accountability metrics, data-driven decision-making, return on investment. Professional development is measured in seat hours and student learning in standardized scores. Teacher effectiveness gets run through observation rubrics that attempt to quantify something inherently resistant to quantification, then those numbers generate rankings and comparisons as though teaching were a production line with measurable throughput.

Fisher called this “Market Stalinism,” and the term is worth sitting with. The promise of market-based reforms in education was supposed to be the elimination of bureaucracy, the introduction of flexibility, the empowerment of individual schools and teachers to innovate. What actually arrived was a different kind of bureaucracy, one focused on producing representations of performance rather than performance itself. Work becomes oriented toward satisfying the audit rather than toward the actual purpose the work is supposed to serve. Teachers spend hours documenting what they are doing instead of doing it. And anyone who has filled out a lesson plan template that no one will ever read knows exactly what this feels like.

The audit culture is not incidental to the teacher burnout crisis. It is a significant structural driver of it. But within teaching realism, the audit culture itself is treated as a given. The question is never whether the observation rubric or the data tracking spreadsheet or the initiative reporting structure is necessary. The question is only how to make compliance more efficient. An AI tool that auto-generates your documentation is the logical product of a system that has accepted the documentation as permanent.

The Privatization of Stress

Fisher coined the term “reflexive impotence” to describe a condition in which people recognize that something is wrong but believe they are powerless to change it. He observed this especially among his students, but the term applies just as well to the teaching profession. Most teachers will tell you that the system is unsustainable. The data confirms what they feel: RAND’s 2025 State of the American Teacher survey found that 53% of K-12 teachers reported burnout, and teachers consistently report worse well-being than comparable working adults across every measured indicator. The conditions are widely acknowledged. What is missing is any sense that the conditions are contingent, that they result from decisions that could have been made differently.

Fisher’s related concept, the “privatization of stress,” is perhaps the most directly applicable to how we frame teaching in America today. When systemic failures produce individual suffering, capitalist realism reframes that suffering as a personal problem. The burned-out teacher is directed toward self-care strategies rather than structural reform. The overwhelmed teacher is offered a time management workshop. The teacher who leaves is characterized as lacking resilience. In each case, the diagnosis locates the problem inside the individual rather than inside the system that produced the conditions.

The entire wellness industrial complex that has grown up around teaching operates on this logic. Mindfulness sessions at in-service days, resilience training, self-care tip sheets: none of these interrogate the structural conditions that produce the stress. They treat the teacher as the site of the problem and the site of the solution, which is exactly what capitalist realism requires. If burnout is a personal failure, then the system that produces it does not need to change. The teacher just needs better coping mechanisms, or, increasingly, better tools.

This is where the AI-as-savior narrative becomes legible as a form of teaching realism. When a product promises to “give teachers their time back,” it is not questioning why that time was taken. It is accepting the extraction as a permanent condition and offering a partial technological offset. The teacher is still expected to do more than any single professional reasonably can. The tool just helps them produce the required outputs faster.

Deskilling by Design

Michael Apple identified this pattern decades before AI entered the conversation. Writing about the introduction of computers into schools in the 1980s and 1990s, Apple used the term “deskilling” to describe the separation of conception from execution in teaching. As curriculum becomes more standardized and prescriptive, as decisions about what to teach and how to teach it move further from the classroom teacher and closer to administrators, publishers, and now software platforms, the teacher’s role narrows. The work does not become easier; it becomes more alienated.

Apple’s analysis reads as uncomfortably prescient in the current moment. The same AI tools that promise to reduce teacher workload also, by their design, relocate decision-making. When a platform generates your lesson plan, structures your assessment, drafts your parent communication, and suggests your differentiation strategies, the teacher’s role shifts from professional with pedagogical expertise to operator executing a system’s outputs. The conception has been separated from the execution, and the tool is doing the conceiving.

This is the irony that teaching realism makes invisible. Everyone acknowledges that teachers are overwhelmed and that the scope of the job has expanded beyond what is sustainable. And yet the proposed solution, in many cases, is to remove more of the intellectual work of teaching from teachers and hand it to systems designed by people who do not know their students, their communities, or their contexts. The teacher gets “time back” but loses another piece of professional autonomy. The workload problem is addressed in a way that deepens the alienation problem, and because teaching realism treats both problems as atmospheric rather than structural, the connection between them never gets examined.

Apple warned that each new wave of technology in education tends to follow this pattern. The technology is introduced with promises of efficiency and empowerment. Because teachers are already intensified (Apple’s term for the condition of having ever more to do with ever fewer resources), they have no time to critically evaluate the technology or to integrate it thoughtfully. They adopt whatever the pre-packaged version offers because they are drowning and anything that floats looks like a life raft. And the result, over time, is that the skills and judgment the technology was supposed to support begin to atrophy.

The Martyrdom Feedback Loop

Teaching realism has a cultural expression, and it looks like the martyrdom narrative. The movies are familiar by now: Freedom Writers, Stand and Deliver, The Ron Clark Story. In each case, the heroic teacher sacrifices health, relationships, and personal life for students who have been systematically underserved. The teacher works three jobs, or gets hospitalized from exhaustion, or watches a marriage dissolve. And the audience is meant to find this inspiring.

What makes the martyrdom narrative a form of capitalist realism rather than just a bad cultural trope is that it naturalizes the conditions under which teachers work. The story never asks why the teacher needs to buy classroom supplies out of pocket. It never asks why the school lacks the resources to serve its students without one individual’s self-destruction. The system’s failures become the backdrop against which individual heroism is measured, and the heroism, in turn, justifies the system. If great teachers can do extraordinary things despite the conditions, then the conditions must be survivable. The ones who leave simply were not committed enough.

This creates a feedback loop that Fisher would have recognized immediately. The martyrdom narrative sets the bar for what a committed teacher looks like, and that bar produces guilt in anyone who tries to set reasonable boundaries. The guilt feeds overwork, which feeds burnout, which feeds attrition, which produces the staffing shortages that intensify the workload on whoever remains. Each turn of the cycle reinforces the sense that this is simply what teaching is, and each new class of teachers enters a profession whose unsustainability has been reframed as a test of character.

Meanwhile, the “calling” framing does complementary work. When teaching is positioned as a vocation rather than a profession, economic arguments for better compensation lose their force. A calling is something you endure, not something you negotiate. The calling framework provides the moral cover for conditions that would be considered unacceptable in any profession not wrapped in the language of sacrifice, and it quietly discourages the kind of collective, material demands that might actually change things.

What Gets Foreclosed

The most significant effect of teaching realism may not be the conditions themselves but the foreclosure of imagination about alternatives. When burnout is treated as permanent weather, the questions that could actually change things stop getting asked. What would teaching look like if class sizes were small enough for a teacher to know every student well? What would shift if teachers had genuine control over curriculum and assessment rather than implementing what gets handed down? What becomes possible when professional development is designed by the people doing the work rather than purchased from a vendor and mandated by an administrator?

These are not utopian fantasies. They are descriptions of conditions that exist in other countries and have existed in American schools at other points in history. But teaching realism forecloses them by making the current arrangement feel like the only possible arrangement. The question is never “should teachers spend their evenings entering data into a compliance system?” The question is always “what tool can make the data entry faster?”

I should be honest about my own position here. I work inside this system. I administer a statewide LMS. I build tools, some of them AI-assisted, that are designed to make educators’ existing workflows more efficient. I have used the language of business ontology in my own professional materials without thinking twice about it, talking about “outcomes” and “data-driven” approaches as though those frames are neutral rather than chosen. Fisher’s framework does not let me off the hook just because I can name what is happening. If anything, it raises harder questions about what it means to build tools that make an unsustainable system slightly more tolerable rather than challenging the premises that make it unsustainable in the first place.

At the same time, Fisher argued that cracks in capitalist realism become visible at the points where the system’s own logic breaks down, and in education those cracks are difficult to ignore. The system claims to value teachers but cannot retain them. It has prioritized student outcomes as its primary justification while simultaneously expanding the demands on teachers in ways that research consistently shows harm those outcomes. And the expertise that was supposed to be central to the profession keeps getting relocated, moved from the classroom teacher to the platform, the curriculum package, the administrative directive. These contradictions are not glitches in an otherwise functional arrangement; they are what the structure reliably produces.

Naming the conditions as constructed rather than natural is not, by itself, a solution. Fisher was honest about that, and I want to be honest about it too. But it is a necessary shift, because as long as we treat teaching’s unsustainability as a feature of the profession rather than a product of specific political and economic choices, the only available responses will be individual accommodations to a broken system. And I am increasingly unsure whether building better accommodations, which is a fair description of a lot of my own work, is enough.