Footnote1 = We capitalize ‘School’ when referring to the full set of historical evolved, cultural facts (including institutions, discourses, authority patterns, methods, etc.) to which any particular teacher, classroom, school, policy, research project, etc., is accountable for and thereby made “a part of.” The School is also kept in the singular to mark the goal of developing the structural model of a synchronic state (Levi-Strauss, Dumont) that is a reprensentation for intellectual, analytic, and practical purposes of conditions found in and out of many actual schools. The model of the School is not intended as a description of any school.
Footnote2 = From the Federal web site
Footnote3 = I am obviously building on the lively tradition which started with Malinowski, Austin and Searle, and then developed into the conversation analysis of Sacks, Schegloff and Goodwin. I also build on the use of utterance in the Bakhtinian tradition. Speech in context is inevitably involved in the construction of society and is the means through which our political conflicts proceed. Obviously, I am willing to go beyond the limits most work in Conversation Analysis and ethnomethodology generally has placed on itself. And I disagree with Bourdieu and others that these traditions cannot handle large-scale social movements.
Footnote4 = Like "the School," the SoE is capitalized to emphasize that I am referring to claims to authority by institutions and their agents. At times I will similarly mention a sub-set of American schools of education who claim and are often granted specific authority. These are the Major schools of education (MSoEs). I am not specifically referring to Harvard, Teachers College, UCLA, Stanford, Vanderbilt, etc (cited here in the rank order published by <i>U.S. News and World Report</i> in March 2006). I am similarly not referring personally either to any of those among their staff who claim the most authority--except perhaps for myself. I know full well the wide range of opinions among these people about all these matters. I am concerned with the positions in which, little by little, faculty and students in both SoEs and MSoEs discover they are put by their most significant political others.
The overall conversation is a long one. Over at least 200 years, it has produced many powerful statements. Over the years an ever larger population has been accountable to sending their children to schools (even though some still do not) organized with prescribed curricula and pedagogies (even though not all are so organized) and in which only certain kinds of people can teach (even though many others do). This ever increasing series of steps and participants have constituted what now appears in the social sciences as “The American School.” Americans had no choice but to respond–even if they disagreed or suffered under it. For there always has been much resistance–by Catholic immigrants, the Amish, people on the far left and right of the political spectrum, etc. Despite the costs, this resistance continues as is revealed by the persisting worries by guardians of the School as they face, for example, those pushing as “Intelligent Design” as science, or proposing any number of quick fixes to persistent difficulties. Something did appear in world history that, like all such massive cultural facts made certain things easier, and some more difficult.
Footnote5 = America, I would now say, refers to a participatory structure, a polity of practice. Americans are those who, willy nilly, must participate whether as constitutive members or as Africans brought in as slaves.
Footnote6 = This list of participants should probably also include the major foundations (Ford, Carnegie, William and Flora Hewlett, are listed in the 2004 report) that enabled the work of NCATE.
Footnote7 = The document is available on various web sites, for example at www.nebo.edu/e_portfolio/docs/INTASC.doc
Footnote8 = I am tempted to use the words American hegemony except for the confusion produced by psychologizing the concept. If hegemony is made to refer to the attitude of persons within a political system, then it cannot be used for my purpose here to highlight the properties of political institutions that present particular, and inevitable, problems that allow for any number of individual responses, from full allegiance to radical rejection.
Footnote9 = My main sources for this summary are the following document: NCATE at 50," Frequently asked questions, and the full Professional Standards. All these documents were accessed on the NCATE web site in April 2006.
Footnote10 = What is never acknowledged, of course, is something Garfinkel repeatedly demonstrated: instruction manuals cannot work as advertised (2002). Basil Bernstein, in his discussions of elaborated codes brought out some of the same issues (Bernstein 1974; Hill and Varenne 1981)
Footnote11 = This identifies the book with critics from the left. There are also critics from the right (Vergari and Hess 2002) that also focus on political hegemony with an emphasis on the involvement of faculty of schools of education in the drafting of NCATE standards, rather than on the hegemony of large industrial corporations.