Since the late 1970s, austerity policies across the so-called population-rich countries of the Middle East and North Africa have had a profound impact on the provision of universal education. State schooling—once invested with weighty aspirations of nationalist and anti-colonial rhetoric—has with few exceptions been undermined by deteriorating conditions and the growth of privatized education. Scholars of the region—and Morocco in particular—have documented how this mix of policies has exacerbated economic and social inequalities, in large part by creating vastly divergent educational experiences for students of different class backgrounds (e.g. Boum, 2008; Boutieri, 2016). While most of this scholarship has focused on the implications of austerity for getting an education, this paper examines its effects on doing education, highlighting on the experience of teachers in Morocco. The Moroccan state’s recent decision to replace tenure with a contract model for K-12 teachers has accelerated a long-perceived decline of the profession’s prestige. This paper documents how this increasing precarity of state-employed teachers has paralleled the growth of markets for alternative, more marginal types of education labor: like tutors, clowns, and trainers. Drawing on long-term ethnography of a state-funded extracurricular school in a small city in Morocco’s Middle Atlas, I analyze encounters between tenured teachers and these other forms of educational labor. Teachers themselves sometimes engage in things like tutoring or facilitating trainings, and other times provide commentary from a distance, like for example evaluating the performances of clowns invited to their schools. Using linguistic anthropological theories of identity performance, I demonstrate how teachers double-down on enacting the prestige of their profession—through language and textual references—even as they point to these alternate forms of educational labor as evidence of its decline. My analysis thus qualifies contemporary accounts that overwhelmingly focus on schooling with a view to its imagined outcomes, positioning it instead as a site of sensemaking about class and cultural politics. Boum, A. (2008). The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Community. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 39(2), 205–223. Boutieri, C. (2016). Learning in Morocco: Language Politics and the Abandoned Educational Dream. Indiana University Press.