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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X0102100202

2001 21: 143Critique of AnthropologyJames Collins

Selling the Market : Educational Standards, Discourse and Social Inequality

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Selling the Market

Educationa l Standa rds, Discourse an d Social

Inequality

James Collins

Department of Anthropology, Universi ty at Albany/ SUNY

Abstract The ca ll for na tional an d state-level educat iona l stan da rds has sweptacross the American educational scene in the last 15 years. Using a language ofcompetition, fair play and equa l treatment, standa rds advocates have captured abroad spectrum of both conservative and liberal support. Drawing upon jour-nalistic reports, advocacy documents and interview data, this article presents ananalysis of interconnected aspects of the evolution of educational reform dis-course, in par ticular, ad vocacy from the leadership of a n ational teach ers unionan d classroo m teachers situated responses to on goin g chan ges. Critically appro -priating from Faircloughs analytic schema and commensurable concepts in Sil-

verstein an d U rban, I analyze intera ctiona l fi gures an d socio-political them esinvolved in the elite an d n on -elite discourse of stand ard s, with par ticular focuson the neo-liberal trope of a new era of work and associated fea rs of increasingineq uality. I conclude by assessing th e differing strength s of th e two frameworksas well as the role o f d iscourse an alysis more gen erally in critical social inq uir y.Keywords discourse an alysis neo-liberalism teachers un ions U nited States

Introduction1

A call for nat ional and state-level educat ional refor m has swept across the

United States for the last 15 years. It has not been a narrow pedagogicaldeba te but instead has had genera l political resonance. As an ar ticle in theAtlanti c Monthlynoted:

Durin g the 1980s the idea of ra ising stand ard s in public education emerg ed asa na tional cause an d as an establishing issue for a cer tain kind o f centrist politi-cian. It provided the opportunity to demonstrate that the liberal impulse tooffer oppo rtun ity to all and the con servative impulse to d emand high per form -ance could be joined. Among the people who used education reform to getonto the national stage were Bill and Hillary Clinton, in Arkansas, and RossPerot, who was the head of a state commission on the subject, in Texas.

(Lema nn , 1997: 128)2

It remains to be seen whether o ppor tunity to all can be provided in peda-gogies and assessments which ignore social differences; new standards may

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simply reinforce the familiar inequalities of educational achievement byincome and race. Indeed, a n otable feature of the standard s movement asit ha s developed over time is that initial commitments to resource equity

resources necessar y to create a level [educat ional] playing fi eld havebeen abandoned as particular initiatives have been developed and imple-mented (Natriello, 1996).

Despite skirmishes over whether there should be national achievementtesting or n ational stand ards, the idea that there should b e some ma nda tedcommon framework for curriculum and assessment in all schools at thestate if not th e federal level has wide appeal in th e U nited States. It is anappeal that crosses party lines, uniting Democrats and Republicans at thena tiona l and state level; it has the active end orsement of the leadership ofnational teachers unions, especially the AFT; and it garners praise fromna tionally synd icated column ists such as arch-con servat ive Thomas Sowelland liberal Gary Wills. In short, it is an elite consensus, and it has resultedin sweeping changes: in the last 15 years, all states in the USA have imple-mented some form of higher standards for curriculum and assessment.

Although there is a substantial critical literature about the standardsmovement, little attention has been given to the for ms of language used inconstructing the new consensus or to the problem of relating alternativeperspectives to the dominant view. In what follows I will present such ananalysis, examining stand ard s advocacy documents and grassroots teachers

responses, focusing on the contrad iction of a rheto ric of eq uality vs. well-known facts of increasing social ineq uality and on the ways in which writersand speakers position themselves in an ongoing debate. I will argue thatdiscourse analysis, in particular critical and anthropological frameworks,can contribute to our understanding of the nature of the appeal of stan-dards, the diffusion of influential arguments, and the resonance of stan-da rds rhetoric with broa d socio-political developments. The impor tan tq uestion , of course, is whether d iscourse an alysis provides privileged th eor-etical and analytical guidance to our search for understanding.

Analytic frameworks

Faircloughs well-known arguments about language an d power and abo utcritica l discourse ana lysis or CDA (1992, 1995) propose th ree analytic levels,one of which derives from traditions of linguistic analysis, the other twofrom contemporary social analysis. Although the terms have shifted overthe years, Fairclough s schema ca lls for analysis of the textual, th e d iscursivean d the society-wide (the postulation of such levels is distinct from th eepistemological concern with interpretation and explanation which Slem-bro uck an d Verschueren ad dress elsewhere in COA 21[1]). The textuallevelinvolves interpretation of words, their sense, conn ota tion a nd metaph oricalassociations, analysis of certain syntactic features, especially grammatical

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voice, an d a na lysis of in teractional features such as turn-taking. The discur-sivelevel involves analysis of conditions of prod uction and interpretation oftext, extending beyond the lexical and syntactic to explore what other tra-

ditions call con text: pa rticipants social and communication-event roles,inter-textua l associat ions in d iscourse, and the a ctual or presumptive distri-bution of texts (G umperz a nd H ymes, 1986). The society-widelevel involvesanalysis of institutionally defi ned personae in typical encounters (such asthe d octor an d patient, the policeman a nd suspect); the interpretation ofpervasive if somewhat indistinct discourse genres (such as therapy/coun-seling t alk, advertising an d o ffi cialese); an d pa ying atten tion to ver y genera lsocial-semiot ic processes, such a s marketization . The value o f th e CDAapproach is tha t it calls for a nd provides some guidan ce for simultaneouslyinvestigat ing textual detail, situated practice and society-wide d evelopmen t tha t is, the combining of linguistic analysis, interpreta tive an alysis of socialpractice and macrosociolog ical concerns with structure. It s weakness is thatactual analyses are often removed from ethnographic or institutionalcontext and thus vulnerable to extensive counter-interpretation (Ver-schueren, COA 21[1]; Widd owson, 1998).

Since it comes from a trad ition of linguistic anthropology tha t has hadlittle engagement with CDA, it is interesting that Natural H istories of Discourse(NH D) (Silverstein and Urban, 1996) sha res analytic affi nities with Fair-clough . An edited volume which self-consciously grapples with the ro le of

text in social an d cultural ana lysis, NHD contains many contributions whichare concerned with the dynamics of authority and power in language useand several (including one by this author) concerned with analysis ofbureaucratic institutions in the United States or Europe. In the introduc-tion to this boo k, Silverstein and U rban present a tripart ite schema of an aly-sis, which various contributors exemplify in their particular case studies,and which is useful as a general overview of the approach taken. Thisschema distinguishes between referential, interactional and metadiscursivelevels. Following the ter minology of Silverstein s chapter (1996), I will referto th ese as denota tiona l text, intera ctional text, and metad iscursive frame.

The denotational textis rough ly equivalent to Faircloughs text. I t comprisesstrict, literal or referential meaning; it has to do with what a text actuallysays in everyday parlance; and it entails the analysis of lexical and syntac-tic contributions to some extended stretch o f d iscourse deemed a text. Theinteractional textis approximate to Faircloughs discursive practice. As itsna me suggests, interaction al text h as to d o with speech-event or communi-cative-act persona e, that is, with real or construab le sources (speakers andwriters, authors, bearers of the word ) and ad dressees (h earers and readers,audiences, receivers of communications). It concerns the complex pos-itioning th at potent ial inter locutors can take vis-a-vis what is actuallyinscribed or spoken and, conversely, how what is actually inscribed orspoken is af fected by those real and potent ial interactan ts (see Irvine, 1996,for a thorough discussion). Metadiscursive framesare authoritative guides

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or struggles to impose authoritative guides for interpreting unfoldingcommun icative events an d th eir text-ar tifacts. Such frames ma y comprisethe interlinked sense of genre and authoritative tradition found in many

small-scale or trad itional social formations (what is often called ritual lan-guage ; Bloch , 1975; Brenn eis and Myers, 1986), o r they ma y be of fi ciallysanctioned bureaucratic concepts and practices in, say, the modern nor-malization of sexuality or intelligence (Mehan, 1996). Metadiscursiveframes are, in their generality, roughly comparable to Faircloughs socialpractice or society-wide level of analysis. Although this summary is also veryschematic, the strength of th e culture-as-discourse approach as art iculatedin NDH is that it also devotes attention to linguistic detail, situational orethno graphic ana lysis, and pro blems of scale, that is, the ana lysis of society-wide ideologies and institutions. Its shortcomings are the converse of Fair-cloughs: many contributions give short shrift to the relation between socialtheor y and the project of discursive-cum-ethno graphic analysis, leavingsociety-wide an alyses histor ically an d sociologically unground ed.

Case I:American Educatorarticles

Let me now turn to the issue at ha nd , the call for educational reform thathas unfolded in the United States in the last two decades. In the analysis

tha t fo llows I will focus on two primar y sources: fi rst, a rticles in th e Ameri-can Educator, the of fi cial magazine of the American Federa tion o f Teachers(AFT), as they develop a consensus about the need for educational stan-da rds of a certa in kind; and second , the response of classroom teachers tothe call for standards. I chose this focus, rather than, say, the documentsproduced by political or corporate elites, because the developing AFT lineon standa rds was intend ed to n egotiate a con sensus. It sough t to persuadethe highly organized workforce of US primary and secondary teachers,those who would (and will) bear th e brunt of putting the textual proposalsinto pra ctice, of bo th th e virtue and inevitability of standard s reform.

The American Educatoris the fl agship publication o f the AFT, which hasbeen th e nation al teachers union m ost vocal source in suppor t of the stan-da rds movement. It h as, in the words of on e of my inter viewees, kept up asteady drumbeat for standards. In order to gain a sense of perspective onhow the mid -1990s consensus in the Educatoremerged, I looked a t 13 yearsof the publication, from 1984 to 1997. In the pages of the Educatorin themid-1980s we fi nd initial ar ticles abo ut the need to reform schooling a nd ,more especially, the profession of teaching, with proposals for nationalteacher testing and certification boards, and we find initial positions takenin what was to become the debate about a common knowledge base forschoo ling, no tably some of E.D . H irschs (1987) early arguments about cul-tural literacy. But we also find articles openly critical of the content ofteach er tests, many ar ticles concerned with aspects of studen t-centered

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learning, and articles addressing the likelihood of decentralizing schooland curriculum administration. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, we seethe outlines of a new AFT agenda fo rm ing aroun d the bann er of standa rds:

there a re ar ticles calling for curriculum standa rds; there are a rticles makinginvidious comparisons between US education and that of the nations thatare the U Ss primar y economic rivals ( Japan an d th e lead nations ofEurope); and, related to this, there are articles arguing for a tight linkbetween education, productivity and the labor market.

By the mid-1990s, wha t we might call the AFT consensus on stand ardsha s emerged. It is largely in reaction to and agreement with other nationalsummits and documents, such a s the President Bush-initiated and Clinton-implemented Goals 2000progra m an d th e governors-led National Edu-cation Summit (Summit, 1996). In Ameri can Educatorat mid-decad e we fi ndnumerous articles promoting stand ard s reform. In these articles there is anincessant linking of school performance to adult jobs; there are frequentinternational compa risons, decr ying the low state o f American student per-formance; and the new, proposed standards are presented as providingboth equality of opportunity and accountability.3

Below I will examine in d etail one par ticular a rticle in th e Ameri can Edu-cator(AE) in order to give a sense of th e par ticular rhetorics involved in thedeveloping union platform. It is an early article by Albert Shanker, thepresident of AFT, who, in the early 1980s, had embraced the education

reform movement that emerged during the first term of Ronald Reagan.In the a na lysis tha t follows, I will attend on ly briefl y to th e content o f text,which largely agrees with the summa r y of th e AEposition just given. I willfocus instead on interactional features of text, particularly the use of pro-nouns and repor ted speech, for they reveal a specifi c and savvy orientat ionto the voice of the o ther . They also suggest a precise linkage to the genera ldiscursive frame.

Albert Sha nker was an infl uential public intellectual, in large par tbecause he was president of the AFT for more than 25 years, and he wroteand spoke extensively on the subject of educa tiona l reform and stand ard s.

In order to explore the discursive aspects of his advocacy for educationalstandards, I will examine in detail one early essay on school reform, OurProfession, Our Schools: The Case for Fundamental Reform (Shanker,1986). In this essay the AFT leader con tinues an earlier argument about theneed for the AFT and its more than 1 million members to join the elite-ledmovement for reforming schools by raising educational standards. Inad dition to the overt con tent, which links school reform to economic trans-formation, the essay also makes an interesting use of personal pronounssuch as I , we and you. These pronouns play a centra l role in constructedquotations, both Shankers and those of other labor leaders, which areinterspersed through this and other essays.

Our Profession, Our Schools begins in a prophetic vein by announc-ing, On ce in a great while, and usually spurred b y crisis, a combination of

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forces and ideas come together in a way that makes real change possible(1986: 11). First among the forces and ideas Shanker mentions is thenationa l report, A Nation at Risk(NCEE, 1983), a n opening salvo in the war

for standard s reform, which was followed by a dozen o ther repor ts in a fewyears; also among the forces are Gallup polls showing that Each year, ahigher and higher percentage of the American people gave low ormed iocre marks to the schoo ls (1986: 11). The response of AFT lead ershipwas to join the debate with, as Shan ker puts it, an open a nd welcome a tti-tude toward school reform. This attitude, in turn, has evoked a tremen-do usly positive response from governors, sta te legislatures, an d the businesscommun ity (1986: 11).

The po litical and economic elite ha d n ow, it seems, embraced th e AFT.Even more strikingly, they addressed the AFT in a catchy mixture ofdemotic and formal styles. When reform conferences or task forces werecontemplated, thoughts immediately turned to the AFT. O r so it seems onthe strength of Shan kers fi rst q uote:

(1) The rewards of par tnership

More often than not, we are now called in at the very beginning and we aretold: You people took a responsible and courageous position three years ago.Without you, this entire reform effort would have been destroyed or seriouslyhampered. From now on we dont want to make any moves without bringingyou in as par tners. ( Shan ker, 1986: 12, emphasis ad ded )

For anyone troubled by old reports of Reaganite class warfare, this quotesummons up a reassuring image of labo rmana gement co llabo ration . Theexact source of the q uote we are left to surmise, but th e voice who add ressesthe we o f the AFT leadership and membership must be the collective voiceof those governors, legislators and business interests earlier mentioned.This elite voice is pleased with the AFT, it seems, attributing a central rolein reform to the union, and making firm commitments to partnership.Note also how this elite voice speaks with conversational directness: it

ad dresses the AFT leadership and by implication the ent ire membership asYou people an d end s with th e colloquial here-and-now of From now onwe don t want to make any moves without bringing you in as par tners.

This reported voice is, of course, a fi ction . Perh aps it represents thecontent of a conversation or set of conversations Shanker had with policycon ference par ticipants, or perha ps it is simply a pleasing d evice to advan cehis argument, but it is presented as a voice directly rendered, that is, aq uote. This representa tional device, the mad e-up q uote, is also familiar tous from ever yda y conversation: we all insert o ther voices into our discourse,varying greatly in how and whether we mark or blur the line between ourspeech and other speech (Bakhtin, 1981; Rampton, COA 21[1]; Tannen,1989). The constructed q uote is familiar to us also from the written sources,for example, newspaper column ists. The journ alistic fi gure of the contrived

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populist is well-known, a Mike Royko, for example, who frequently quotesto us voices, in humor and seriousness, which we know are made-up, butthe voices somehow add to the verisimilitude of the account and to the

columnists persona a s a guy on the street.Shankers art icles and essays use the fauxq uotes frequently, at times for

quite serious rhetorical work, such as to present evidence for arguments inthe for m of stories involving rea l people who engage the nar rator in directdialogue. In other early ar ticles ad vocating school reform, Sha nker (1985)links the need for educational reform to fundamental changes in theeconomy, following with a story that dramatizes the point about economicchan ge. Nor is Shan ker the on ly labor leader to use such ventriloq uism toenliven th e message o f economic chan ge.

In O ur Profession, O ur Schoo ls th e shop-fl oor stor y discussed belowis not on e of Sha nkers own d evising. Rath er, he uses a stor y told b y EdgarL. Ba ll, then international secretar y for th e United Steelworkers of Americawhen Ball, Shan ker and other national union leaders had met with a groupof university presidents during a national Roundtable on Labor andH igher Ed ucation (Sha nker, 1986: 14). Ba lls stor y recycled in Sha nkersessay concerns an aluminum plant in the state o f Arkansas, a factor y pre-viously marked by adversarial relations between workers and management,then redesigned to b ring about a n ew collabora tive spirit. We know that thisha ppy outcome occur red b ecause the shop-fl oor workers tell us so. O r a t

least they seem to do so, for the heart of Balls account is a long quotedexchange between himself and an unnamed group of factory workers. Iha ve excerpted the stor y in example 2 in ord er to show the q uoted sections.As in example 1, the fi rst an d second person pronouns are in bold type.

(2) Excerpt of story about factory reorganizati on

I talked to a group of employees in the first department that tried the newsystem. The fi rst th ree mo nth s the plan was in effect, do wn-time was reducedby half, and within the next three mo nth s decreased by half again. I asked th emWhy? How did youdo it? And this is what they said: What weused to d o was

come to work, punch time cards, go to our work station, a nd stand there untilthe foreman came by and told uswhat to d o. If he didn t tell us to do someth ingthat needed to be done, wedidn t do it. If he wasn t there enough , that was hisfault, he was the boss. If h e told us to d o it wrong, wedid it wrong even if weknew it was wron g, because wewere subject to discha rge if wedidnt do whathe told us to do.

If something went wrong, after weknew it was going wrong with the eq uipmentor process, wedidn t say anything to an yone ab out it. If the foreman ha ppenedto come by and catch it, fi ne. If he didnt, welet it go. If eq uipment broke down,we shut th e power off. Wedidnt call anybody. We stood there until someon efrom management came by and looked at it, and they had to decide to call

maintena nce. When m aintenan ce got there, wedidn t tell them. If they knewhow to fi x it, fi ne, and if they fi xed it wrong, too ba d, that wasnt our concern.We werent being paid to do those things. We were being paid to do the fewlittle things that were in our job description a nd that s all wedid.

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I asked, Wha t a re you d oing no w? Their rep ly: Weknow how to run the plant.We come to work; we start operating it. We are running maintenance eventhough its not in our job description. We help each other. If one is having

trouble, wehelp. If we think something is going to go wrong, weplan aroundthat and wealert maintena nce in advance and wehave them th ere and we tellthem whats wrong, and we show them and we help them fix it. (cited inShanker, 1986: 1415, emphasis added)

Wha t is appealing at the level of textual con tent should be clear enoughin this representation. The old, wasteful intransigence of adversarial laborin which workers punch time cards and stand there until told . . . whatto do is replaced by a new work order in which those workers know howto run the plant, run maintenance even though its not [their] job andhelp each oth er. H owever, I do not want to d well on these thematic or ref-

erential-textual contrasts. In stead , I want to discuss how the interaction ofpron ouns and repor ted d iscourse gives a poetic structure that orders thecontrast of the bad old an d th e good new. By poetic I mean the pervasivestructuring o f discourse by par tial and complete repetition, long ago no tedby Jakobson (1960) and subsequently analyzed in a variety of vernacularconversation and narrative forms (Hymes, 1996; Tannen, 1989).

Interacti onal text

In th e case at ha nd , this aspect of form can be better discerned by empha -

sizing the pa ttern ing of q uestion and response within th e quo ted sections.These I have schematized in example 3 using verbs of question andresponse to frame major units and organizing parallel series of common-subject clauses and sentences:

(3) Schematization of reported speech and we-clauses in story of factoryreform:A

I talked to a g roup . . .

I asked themWhy? H ow d id you d o it?

This is what they saidWhat we [workers] used to do[we] come to work[we] punch time cards[we] go to our work stations[we] stand th ere until the foreman came byand told us what to doif he didnt tell us to do something

we didn t do itif he wasn t there

that was his fault

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if he told us to do it wrongwe did it wron g

. . .

If something went wrongwe didnt say

If the foreman caught it,fi ne

If he didntwe didn t

If the eq uipment brokewe shut the power offwe didnt callwe stood th ereWe didn t call anybodyWe stood there

When maintenance got there,we didnt tellwe didn t help

If they knew how to fi x it,fi ne

If they fi xed it wrong,too bad

that wasnt our concernWe weren t being paid to d o those things

We were being pa id to d o th e few little things . . .

B

I askedWhat a re you d oing now?

Their reply

We know how to run th e plantWe come to workwe start running itWe are running maintenanceWe help each otherIf one is having trouble,

we helpIf we think someth ing is going wrong

we plan around th atwe alert ma intenance

we ha ve them th erewe tell them what s wrongwe show themwe help them fi x it

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In this example, the before and after states (A and B) are framed by Ballsq uer y I asked th em an d th e collective workers response This is what theysaid or Their reply. In the workers fi rst response, they begin with a fi ve-

clause sequen ce Wha t we used to do . . .. This is followed by a long seriesof negative conditionals: sentences beginning with if are paired with aclause repor ting some non-desirable b ehavior, often in sets of three pairs(e.g. If he d idnt tell us what to d o, we didn t d o it). In the fi nal sectionB, after the second I ask/They reply couplet, the anonymous workerspresent several sequences of we clauses which form a positive-contrastparallel to the conditionals and negative outcomes reported in the initialparagraph (compare th e fi ve-clause we sequence th at o pens section Bwiththe fi ve-clause seq uence that opens A). The second of the worker responsesections closes with a seven-clause seq uence, which begins If we think some-thing is going wrong , an d then lists their responses in a pair of three clausesets (We plan, alert, have them there; we tell, show how, help them), whichspecify the engaged, productive new work relations.

A society-wi de metadi scursive frame

What are we to make of such represented discourse? First, we should notethat although it is presented as a direct quote there is little indication ofhow it was obtained in order to permit the presumed accuracy of . . . . Inshort, as with Shankers initial example, it is a story told as a conversation,

a fo rm fa miliar from studies of myth (Co llins, 1987; Hymes, 1981). Second ,we should note its for mal symmetr y, which suggests a polished , o ften-toldtale, as folklorists ha ve shown (B auman , 1986). Such for mal int ricacy in lan-guage use is no t uncommon, b ut it is ar tful, in a low-key, vernacular fashion(Gee, 1996; Hymes, 1996; Tannen, 1989).

What is distinctive in this case, however, is that the vernacular poeticsis being used to dramatize and give voice to a vision of a new work order(Gee et al., 1996) and so we join interactional text with a metadiscursiveframe of society-wide signifi cance. In this new econ omic era workers col-labora te closely with man agement. By implication , given Shankers recon-

textua lization of the talk, rank-an d-fi le teach ers imag inatively join han dswith the governo rs and business people of elite-led educa tiona l reform. Inthis story, constructed out of imagined everyday voices, a virtual inter-actional text unfolds. I, you and we are layered: workers, managers, Ball,Shanker, we-the-read ers; I is Ba ll asking and Shanker arguing, we arefactory workers, the AFT, readers-and-author. Like all texts, this tale seeksa sympathetic reader/listener. It offers to draw in readers, insofar as theywould identify with those voices or gran t th em a special authenticity, of fer-ing read ers places as imag inar y par ticipants in a fauxdialogue I ask/Theyreply about a brave new world of work.

Pursuing an analysis of meta discursive frame a nd society-wide signifi -cance, we should ask: what is this story about? Why is it told as it is told?Why does it appear in the essay Our Profession? Do we have a case of the

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workers voices at th e service of a neo -liberal message ab out the virtues ofderegulated workplaces and the irrelevance of class confl ict? It wouldappear so, at least in the d eft rhetoric of national and interna tional union

leaders. Such leaders use the rhetoric of fauxquo tes to mediate their con-tradictory position, as aspiring partners of university presidents, governorsand th e business community, and also as the voice of th e working peoplethey organ izationally represent. In this way textual form contributes to thesocial practice o f d isseminating a society-wide new consensus about po ssi-bilities, alliances and struggles recall that Shanker heard this particulartale at a nationa l Labor and H igher Education Roundtab le. Interactiona ltext suggests a metadiscursive frame we are all equal participants in thenew smart economy. In the indexically ambiguous reference of we andyou, there is a rapid b lending and doubling o f labor leaders and businessinterests, workers and lead ers, the AFT and tea chers, poin ting to and tellinghappy stories about th e contrad ictions of auton omy and control, for factor yworkers and classroom teachers.

Case II: Teachers responses

But who hears the ha ppy stories and wha t do th ey make of th em? Thus farI have developed an analysis of textual features and interactional dimen-

sions of two written texts. Written texts, of course, always leave open thequestion of how they are read. A straightforward question is to ask Whatabo ut read er response? Since there is no provision fo r letters to the ed itorin Ameri can Educator, we are deprived of an obvious source of data on thisq uestion. H owever, when classroom teach ers were q ueried a bout standa rdsreform a nd the na tiona l union, the question of we grew more complex.

Wha t follows is based on in terviews I cond ucted with six teachers, fromprimary, middle and high school, in the City of Albany School District inNew York State. The in terviews were open -end ed b ut structured aroun dq uestions about the effects of standa rds on classroom practices, the po ten-

tial benefi ts and dra wbacks of standard s-driven curriculum an d assessment ,and th e inter viewees sources of infor mat ion ab out standard s reform. Theinterviewees were selected opportunistically, from people I knew fromhaving a child in the district, participating in activities such as the citysyouth soccer program and teaching in a local university. Interviewees wereprobably somewhat younger and more overtly concerned about educationissues than their peers in the district.

The ana lysis ad dresses text-con tent themes, then turn s to interactionalfeatures, before d iscussing the framing o r society-wide reson an ces of th eteachers accounts. In discussing text content I select excerpts to illustratethemes. This convention al, gen era lizing strategy is used because it providesstraightforward accounts of what some teachers, often left out of thedebate, are saying about standards. In analyzing interactional text, I will

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note some shared practices but then focus on a particular interview, inwhich pronoun use will be analyzed, providing a contrast with theShanker/Ball case just discussed.

Denotati onal text

In responses to q uestions about whether they read union periodicals suchas the American Educatorand where they heard about standards reforms,these teachers provided a n uanced but con sistent characterization of a reac-tive union stance. As one person put the matter when asked why the localunion supported stand ards chan ge: Its not gonna go a way . . . Teacherswant respect as professiona ls . . . [but] if they don t show leadership, ever y-on e will say Where are th e teachers? . Tha t is, the pressure for edu-cationa l changes via standa rds was ir resistible, and so the un ion had to act.Anoth er held the opinion tha t unions were no t leading stand ards reform;instead , they joined the gen eral rheto ric but were actually concern ed withpra ctical stuff : The [union] rhetoric is Let s have higher stand ard s, letsha ve professiona l development . . . but who pa ys for it? According toanother, the style of reporting in union publications had shifted in recentyears. Whereas previously such publications had featured some debateabout standards, currently they accepted the curriculum and testingchanges as a fai t accompli. Of union publications she said, Now its anec-dotes . . . about ho w someone in a classroom is doing [in response to new

curriculum or assessments] . . .. O nly a teacher committed to a d istincteducational alternative saw the AFT as providing leadership, but from hisperspective, it was the wrong leadership. As this teacher put it: WhenShanker hears about Essent ial Scho ols all he says is I ts too vague.

When asked about potential losses as well as gains in standards reform a topic frankly addressed in Ameri can Educatorarticles in the early 1980sbut given scant attention in the 1990s the interviewees were quick toidentify losses and gains for teachers as well as for students. In the interestof space, I will focus on the latter.

For one respondent, the gains for students included a potential

increase in eq uality, which echo es a consistent theme of the literature a dvo-cating standa rds refor ms. A teacher of studen ts from non-English speakingbackgrounds held a similar view and provided an example of valuablechange. She felt tha t th e new state-wide curriculum frameworks and testswould encourage a change in teachers perspectives on Limited EnglishProficiency (LEP) students, disrupting an academic ghetto of low expec-tations and classroom neglect in which such students languished. This wasbecause the pressure o f new curricula and new tests raised teachers a ware-ness of LEP issues and of the special needs of these linguistically diversepopulations. As she a rgued, the n ew environment ca used more teachers torealize that these [LEP] students are intelligent, can be held to high stan-dards.

All respon den ts, however, a lso expressed the ga ins of stan da rds-dr iven

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reform in terms of social class ad van tage. O ne in terviewee, who wonderedaloud about a new and demanding English test for fourth and eighthgraders, asked who the [new] test is for. She later answered her rhetori-

cal question with a single word , Niskayuna , naming one o f the a reas mostaffl uent suburbs, the site of G eneral Electrics major research and develop-ment complex. The ESL instructor argued that the change to mandatedhigher standa rds was primarily a midd le-class reform and tha t those whoalready have it it being a solid academic preparation would get abetter education.

The potential losses for students were also expressed in terms of theloom ing presence of social class. As on e experienced teach er and lon g-termeducation advocate put it: If you say Im putting the bar up higher anddon t provide the resources [you will have] h igher ra tes of kids who a ren tgoing to make it. Two other teachers provided statistical illustrations ofhow the new high school exit req uirements would a ffect studen ts who werefrom non-English-speaking background s or who were members of ethno -racial minorities. The fi rst illustration , provided by an ESL instructor, con -sisted of the observation that in the 1999 Regents Exam in English, newlyrequired for all New York seniors but with a special dispensation for lin-guistic mino rity students, on ly 40 percent of LEP-classifi ed students tookthe exam, an d o f those 40 percent, only 50 percent passed th e exam.4 Whatsuch fi gures mean is tha t of th e total LEP population, on ly 20 percent (50

percent 40 percent) passed the test that would qualify them for a highschool diploma under New York States new criteria. Assume a worst-casescenario little or no change in the preparation of linguistic minoritystudents for the Regents Exam and you would have catastrophic failurerates for this population in the near future

The second illustration was provided during an interview with a highschool instructor. H e reported retention an d gra duation n umbers for thecitys high school. Because of their complexity, they are summarized inTable 1. In the table enrollment rates for each grade are given (roundedto th e nearest hund red) , as are the grad uation and Regents test-passing

rates (rounded to the nearest ten).Important for making sense of these figures is that the Regents

Diploma used to be required only of those pursuing an academic track,tha t is, four-year college-preparato r y programs. U nd er the new standa rds,however, the Regents Diploma is to b e req uired of a ll studen ts, beginn ingin the year 2000. With that in mind, there are two things to observe fromthese numbers. First, there is a ver y low retent ion-an d-graduat ion rate fo rthose entering ninth grade class: only 220 out of 700 (31 percent) reachthe twelfth grad e and grad uate. Second , since two-thirds of the freshmanclass are minorities (450 out of 700), it is striking that only 30 minoritystudents received a Regents Diploma in 1999. Wha t th ese numbers suggestis tha t if no thing changed that is, if the n ew, h igh-stakes stand ard s areput in place without a significant change in the preparation of these

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working-class, minority students for the exams then more than 90 percent

would be expected to fail or drop out.5

Interactional Text

I have thus far discussed certain themes in teachers text, in particular,their responses to ca lls for stand ard s reform a nd the specifi c assessment andcurricular changes resulting from those calls. In doing so, I have viewedthese teachers as the potential, though not actual, we of Shankersrhetoric of standards reform.6 Let me now turn directly to the teachersinteractional text or discourse practice. Several features were salient,though in th e interests of space I will ha ve to trea t these briefl y. First, the

interviews always involved an initial negotiation of what the topic was, thatis, of h ow the ter m standards was to b e interpreted. As should be clear bynow, the con cept and d iscourse of r aising education al standa rds has mul-tiple meanings.7 Interviewees took my initial request to talk with themabo ut effor ts and calls to raise educationa l stan dards as an o pening to ta lkabout various things, among them (a) a new, rigid reading program in alocal elementary school, (b) an effort to create an alternative high school,and (c) a new state-wide curriculum.

Second, like the labor leaders discussed earlier, teacher interviewees

also quoted the voices of others. We have already seen a number of theserepresented voices; in example 4 they are listed by ostensible source andwith reported discourse in italics:

(4) The voices of others

Generic voiceswho call for reform: Its not gonna go away . . . Teachers wantrespect as professionals . . . [but] if they [an d their organizations] don t showlead ership, everyone will say Where are the teachers?

If you say I m putti ng the bar up higher and dont provide the resources [youwill have] higher rates of kids who arent going to make it.

Unions and labor leaders: The [union] rhetoric is Lets have higher standards,let s have professional development . . . but who pays for it? When Shanker hearsabo ut Essential Schoo ls all he says is It s too vague.

156


Table 1 High school retention, graduation and Regents Diplomas

Grade level students Total number of students Total minori ty students

9 700 45010 50011 40012 300G raduation 220Regents Diploma 120 30



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Other teachers: [o f cynical colleagues respon se to th e call for stan da rds] Theyjust say I tl l pass.

In addition, teachers also used pronouns to summon an audience aswell as restrict or widen the scope of their claims. This can be seen byexamining excerpts from a particular interview. Early in this interview therespondent, AA, uses yknow extensively, in a classic bid to establish acommon intersubjective frame of reference.

(5) Situating self in interviews: yknow

AA: Umm . . . I think mostly I m informed through the district . . . yknowthey send out . . . things pretty regularly about whats up [JC: Ok] . . .what s expected yknowthe district created th is um core curriculumthe pa st couple of years, how one incorpo rates the standa rds [JC: uhhuh] . . . So, I get the districts perspective on it . . . But I also, yknow,keep up on a couple of journals myself . . . which um . . . yknow, keepme informed too I . . . [JC: uh huh] . . . I subscribe to RethinkingSchools . . .

JC : O h, yo u d o get th at . . .AA: Yeah, so its kind of like, yknow, the oth er side of things [JC: Yeah]

. . . um [JC: Yeah] . . . So thats very helpful

Note tha t the yknows work: my backchannel uh huh s and yeahs are fre-

quent and appropriately timed, suggesting a smooth interaction. Both AAand myself had felt th at the interview went well.

AAs interview is also interesting, for comparative purposes, in its useof we. U nlike the writerly use of royal or ed itorial we, AA always used theprono un to refer to specifi c collectivities with which she was involved, fo rexample, the teachers in her district (she sat on a district-wide committee)and the children in her classroom. The only exception to this patternoccurred when she broached the issue of the general goals of education,when she used a generalizing we. Both uses can be seen in example 6:

(6) Expanding self: specific and general we

Specific we [teachers in the district]: Well, for example . . . yknowwejust th is last year wegot this new language a rts um . . . assess-ment that wehave to do o n each kid in our classroom . . .

Specifi c we [members of the par ticular classroom] : I just make like agame out of it, like Weregonna do a test and . . . and wejust like, whatever, do the test and we get on with our busi-ness.

G eneral we [teachers and schools in the project of education]: Who a rewecreating them to be as people? I th ink tha t is much moreimportant . . . I feel like building a community is a primar ygoal in here and tha ts what werecreating.

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Wha t th ese intera ctional tra its imply is that inter views, like published docu-ments, involve a complex work of orientation. Interviewees (and inter-viewers) must estab lish a place or position from which they speak, a footing

(G offman , 1981). In ad dition, others are always potentially co-present asan interviewer, a joint responden t, or the d iverse, imaginar y, yet q uotablesocial others in terms of whom we align our utterances (Bakhtin, 1981).However, there is a notable difference between the union leaders and theteach ers. The lat ter, a t least in th is event that is, when discussing standa rdsin a semi-for mal setting are pa rsimonious in their use of reported speechand generalizing pronouns. They evoke the voices of social others, but inbrief sayings; they do no t con struct elabora te d ialogues. They use pron ounsto situate and to generalize, but in ways attuned to the circumstances ofspeech an d with mo re circumspection about speaking fo r oth ers.

A metadiscursive frame

When we turn to consider a metadiscursive frame for the teachers talk, itwas ostensibly standards and educational reform, but there were numer-ous differences from elite standards advocacy. Unlike the AFT and govern-ment documents on standards, these teachers did not emphasize the linkbetween skills and the economy. They were more attuned, as a group, tothe complex, often contradictory, relation between efforts at account-ability and equality, and they did not view this relation as a fixed

dichotomy. Nor did they talk about standards as a unified set of ideas orprocesses. They cited particular programs and linked the history of stan-da rds reforms to state-wide political cond itions for exa mple, the electionof a conservative Republican governor in New York State in 1994 cha ngedthe terms of debate about ed ucationa l reform.8 As noted, they were quitesensitive to the stratifying implications of raising the bar without provid-ing the resources; indeed, their statistical stories can be understood asalarms about just that possibility.

Conclusion: critique in an age of uncertainties

The appeal of standards-driven reform is powerful but ambivalent. Itincludes a familiar and worthy call for greater equality, linked to appre-hension of long-stan ding obstacles to such equality . For elites dominatingthe d iscussion, stand ard s rheto ric resonates with the language of new capi-talism, an image of skilled populations performing smart work in non-hierarchical arrangements. But capitalism requires control of labor,however inserted into the labor process, an d the new, neo-liberal workorder also promises greater insecurity an d ineq uality as society-wide fea-tures (Bauman, 1997; Bourdieu, 1998). Many people, including the class-room teachers interviewed in this study, seem to have intimations of thisdystopian system potential.

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Und erstanding a n ongo ing large-scale change, like that represented bynumerous standa rds reform effor ts in the U S, is an open-end ed process.The justifi cations for, fears about an d apparent results of such cha nges are

open to much deba te and are pa rt of a wider po litical-discursive fi eld. Forexample, in the ten mon ths since an initial dra ft of th is ar ticle was prepared,there have been a series of reports about the unacceptably high rates offailure on the revamped New York Sta te assessments. State legislators havemet to discuss the standa rds and whether they should be amend ed (B rown-stein, 1999; Karlin, 1999). Troubled schoo ls in New York City were exposedfor infl ating their test scores (H ar tocollis, 1999). And the state Commis-sioner of Education, who had led the drive for new standards, was testify-ing on behalf of lawsuits seeking to redress glaring inequalities in localschool funding.9 Across the nation, the standards movement has led toextensive cha nges in cur riculum and especially in th e imposition of high-stakes testing, and it has begun to generate a g rassroo ts opposition . Loosecoalitions of parents, students, civil rights organizations and independentteachers in various large states Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, NewYork, Ohio an d Texas ha ve begun lobbying legislato rs, fi ling lawsuits andorganizing test boycotts (Ed itors, 1999; FairTest, 2000; Ross, 2000; Schmid t,2000); some, such as the one in the Detroit schools this past spring, havebeen q uite dramatic (G ibson , 2000).

I h ave tried in the fo regoing to show how d iscourse analysis could o ffer

a critical entreto this dyna mic social arena . Proposing a schematic synth e-sis of two infl uential approa ches to d iscourse analysis, I have suggested aline of approach to a complex discursive formation, arguing that payingdetailed attention to the rhetoric of standards in key institutional texts(essays calling for standards in national union publications) and to theresponse of memb ers of th e ostensible aud ience of th ose texts (in this case,classroom teach ers) can provide insight into the interplay of the con tent o ftexts, the real and virtual patterns of interaction they occasion, and themore general discursive frames and social practices they evoke and instan-tiate.

Most basically, an orienta tion to d iscourse should remind us tha t whatwe might a bstractly und erstand as systemic processes or social-structura ldynamics are expressed in familiar idioms: arguments made, stories told,warnings given, senses of aud ience evoked and man ipulated . H ere we seea clear strength of the NHD approach over CDA: the formers sense ofinteractional dimensions, variously mediated, is much richer and moresoph isticated than CD As analyses to d ate. This is signifi can t because itreminds us, as the preceding ana lysis confi rms, that all texts, written orspoken, are the precipitates of complex interactional positionings, posi-tionings which often evoke wider frames of interpretation. The issue ofwider fra mes brings to light, however, a strength of CDA. Bo th the elite andno n-elite discourses an alyzed above sho w a preoccupa tion with the imag-inable economic effects of schooling with labor leaders and other elites

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telling tales of neo-liberal progress; teachers and diverse test-oppon entsgiving warn ings and citing fi gures. In characterizing this tension betweenneo -liberalism an d wha t the French ca ll la fractu re sociale, CDAs constructs

of social practice/society-wide analysis give more leverage. Frankly drawingon concepts from the Marxian tradition, such as hegemony, CDAs socialpractice orients us to overt and covert conflicts, involving the linkages ofideas, econo mics and po litical positions found in the stand ard s movement.In ad dition, via concepts such a s marketization , CD A attempts to theorizetendencies within late capitalist/late modern social formations such asthe pervasiveness of market processes and idioms, the contested terrain ofpublic institutions which are quite evident in the discourses of standardsand school reform. NHD s metadiscursive frame is a mo re neutral categor yas to historical or sociological position, gaining perhaps greater descriptivepotential, but offering less theoretical purchase in the case at han d.

Neo-liberalism was the domina nt political and economic or thodoxy inthe 1990s and remains so tod ay, both na tiona lly and internationally. As thecurrent hegemony, it may be accepted on its own terms as the vision ofthe only possible society, a reformable if not perfect society (Giddens,1998); or it may be challenged a s an elite political-discursive effor t to hid ethe social fractures of a complacent late capitalism, as critics contend (B our-dieu, 1998; Singer, 1999). However, even if we agree that neo-liberalismneeds criticism and that analysis of texts and discursive practices can

advance that critical goal, we are left to deal with the complexity anddynamism of th e social phenomena we would und erstand. The theoreticaland analytical tools we need for such tasks are not given in advance. Reply-ing to the question raised at the beginning of this article, discourse analy-sis frameworks do not offer a privileged theoretical perspective on thecontempora r y world. Put more sharply, both NHD/linguistic an thro pologyand CDA are inadequate fo r a genera l account o f the d iscursive-and-social.Perhaps, that is how they are intended. In both frameworks, discourse isexplicitly presented as something not separable from society. Perhaps likethe concept of culture (Kuper, 1999), discourse is best understood as

always-already enta ngled in th e political an d economic, tha t is, as insuffi ci-ent on its own. Discourse analysis can and should, however, be part of acritical orientation to the postmodern era we now inh abit in which thereappear to b e no absolute foundations for knowledge, no sure programs forthe future, and no certainty about th e relation o f critic and world (And er-son , 1998; Bauma n, 1997). It is in tha t spirit tha t th e preceding argumenthas been offered.

Notes

1 Based on a paper originally presented in the session The Relevance of Critiquein Discourse Analysis at the 98th Annual Meeting of the American

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Anthropological Association, Chicago, IL, 20 November 1999. I am indebted toPeter Johnston for initial impetus to begin this line of analysis, to members ofthe FWO O nd erzoeks-gemeenschap Taa l, macht en iden titeit/Research

G roup on Language, Power and Id entity for encouragement an d conversation,to the Albany school teachers who agreed to be interviewed, to Mary Bucholtzfor comments on th e conference paper, and to B en Rampton , Rebecca Rogers,Karen Sykes and Jan B lomma ert fo r comm ents on later written versions.

2 On the cusp of a US presidential election, we would now add the names of AlG ore and G eorge W. Bush to th ose who used education reform to get onto thenational stage.

3 For example, the Ameri can Educatorha d special issues in spring 1994 on WorldClass Standards, invidiously comparing American college exams to Europeanand Japanese exams; in fall of that same year, it had another special issuedevoted to Revitalizing our Schools, which presented what has become the

magazines position on national curriculum frameworks; spring of 1996devoted another special issue to New Life for the Standards Movement,repeating and elaborating th e argumen ts mad e in 1994 and pro viding a set ofauthoritative guidelines for state-by-state devising of standards.

4 Subsequent to the interview, the interviewee supplied a fax copy of her sourcefor th e fi gures: copies of fi gures from a repo rt to th e New York State English-Lan guage Learn ers Advisor y G roup , originally par t of Item for Discussion fo rthe Board of Regents Committee on Elementary, Middle, Secondary andContinuing Education. Prepared under the signature of James A. Kadamus,Deputy Com missioner, Offi ce of Elementar y, Middle, Seconda r y and Con tinu-ing Education (New York State), 14 October 1999.

5 Of course, things will not remain exactly the same. As the Regents Diplomasare required of all students, then the great majority who have heretoforechosen the less academically demanding Local Diploma will henceforth haveto shift to the Regents. What the teachers statistics emphasize is how few arecurrently prepared to do so.

6 Potential not actual, since no respondents appeared to read Ameri can Educatorregularly. The state AFT publication New York Teacherdoes appear to have beenread more often.

7 Indeed, it may be, as Urciuoli (1999) characterizes the term multiculturalism,a strategically deployable shifter, that is, a term with relatively little inherentsemantic content, which allows contending parties to talk about differentthings while appearing to talk about th e same th ing.

8 As one respondent put it, [after the governors election] we went from thecompact for learning to standards an d from standards to exams .

9 He argued, q uite reasonably, that low-income districts must have moreresources, not fewer, than th e affl uent d istricts with which th ey are supposedto compete (Roy, 1999).

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James Collins is Professor of Anthropology and Reading at the University atAlban y/SUNY. He is an a nth ropo logist and linguist whose primar y research ef for tshave been in critical studies of language and education and Native American lan-guages and cultures. His recent publications include Understanding Tolowa H istoriesand Culture, Dream, and Political Economy, an edited special issue of InternationalJournal of Quali tati ve Studies in Education, 12(3). He is currently at work on a newbook, Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identi ty. Address: Dept. of Anth ropology,U niversity at Albany/SU NY, Albany, NY 12222, U SA. [ ema il: collins@alba ny.edu]

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Vendiendo El Mercado-standars Educacionales-discurso y Desigualdad Social

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