This project is at its very early stages.  It mostly consist of various experiments at ethnographic representation of large scale schooling processes that involve the ongoing activity of tens of thousands of people in different positions.

We hope that this will provide a more systematic way of talking, as Varenne and McDermott (1998, and passim), about "The School America builds."  It is an attempt to address the challenge Koyama (2008) set to them when she pointed out that "America," in their work, was not analyzed anywhere to the level of ethnographic detail as was their work on classroom and other such settings.  In her work, she started this process of carefully tracing the connections that make single utterances or actions "sensible," and we continue it here.

The work is grounded in ethnomethodology with the major caveat that, as anthropologists, we are concerned with the historicity of "immortal facts" (culture) as well as their (syntagmatic and indexical) temporal unfolding and constitution.  The work is also inspired by Latour's expansion of ethnomethodological concerns (2005) from local settings to the network of settings that may constitute the large scale processes with which the social sciences must also be concerned.  What we are attempting to trace may be what he called a "network." Mostly, we will talk about the temporal linking of settings as constituting a "web." 

graphic evocation
 
 
 

By talking of webs, we index our ties to an intellectual tradition of work in anthropology generally associated with Geertz and before him Schultz and Weber.  Geertz wrote of human beings as "suspended in webs of significance he himself as spun" (Geertz 1973:5).  We extend this famous metaphor, although not in the direction Geertz took it when he expalined that this view of anthropology meant that it had to be an "interpretive" science.  We take the web (or network) metaphor as a challenge to trace the linkages, if not look for the spider.  Anthropology is the science which explores how human beings get "caught" ("suspended," darkly) in these webs--and thereby continue to separate culture from individual volition or constitution.

The problem, relatively simply stated, is to relate

graphic evocation

  1. NCLB regulations (e.g. a 2009 "guidance" document), as written by the Federal Department of Education,
  2. to moment to moment interaction in a classroom (e.g. a reading lesson as analyzed by McDermott),
  3. or a planning meeting with principal and teachers.

Many would first attempt to summarize the relationship in a flow chart of

This is not what we are trying to do here. Instead, we are trying to trace the interactions made possible or necesseary by any of the (speech) acts that have been accomplished.

  1. Tracing conversations

    in what we consider a temporal, conversational process that eventually produces the historical (cultural) state we find ourselves in. For example, we must imagine [IN OTHER WORDS, THIS IS A DISSERTATION TOPIC EITHER IN HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, POLICY STUDIES, ANTHROPOLOGY, ETC.] that the development of NCLB involved

    graphic evocation

    1. conversations between lobbyists for the test preparation industry and various congressmen.
    2. conversation among congressional staff members on how to deal with the lobbyists
    3. conversations with the administration
      1. top to top (Bush with Kennedy)
      2. staff to staff (congressional aide with under-secretaries)

    The question then becomes: what do these people talk about? what forms of speech do they use? when? in what media (very much in the plural: glossy publications, e-mails, phone calls, the web)?

  2. Specifically:
    1. Conversations in the national headquarters of the corporations as they plan how and whom to lobby.

    2. graphic evocation

      Conversations with local levels officials.
      1. It would include New York State which, as an SEA, develops the list of approved providers for LEAs.  This list incorporates all types of associations and corporations, some of which get added and later substracted.  This implies renewed conversations between each.
      2. In New York City this would also include the mayor as well as the chancellor (and the conversations they would all have had are different now than they might have been years ago, when the mayor did not have administrative control of the NYC schools (thus "culture"). 
    3. Conversations between administrators of the NYC Department of Education and school principals
    4. Conversations between school principals and particular SES providers.
      1. for example:
        Assistant Principal (AP): It’s okay. Don’t worry. The kids will go one hour to Great Works and then your teachers can go into the rooms and teach for an hour for SES.
        Field manager 4 (FM4): But our program runs for two hours ... How can that work?
        AP: Well, we don’t have any more rooms and so that has to happen. Don’t worry. ... we’ll work it out. You can bill for two hours....
        FM4: That is not what was agreed upon during our program planning meeting. You knew our program was a sixty hour program split in to two-hour sessions, not one hour and we are not authorized to have other, non-Strategy staff in our rooms. ...
        AP: Don’t worry. Bill them as usual.
        Koyama (2008: 163)

        Note how, in this conversation, the protagonists index various other conversations held in other webs within which both are caught (arrangement with other programs in the school vs. the legal requirements place by NYC, acting on behalf of NY State, acting on behalf of the Federal Governmen).  Note how the conversation is, also, about how to "pass" as doing what one has been told to do (lying to the panoptic warden?).

    5. Ongoing conversations within the SES providers about how to deal with issues arising:
      1. for example:
        General manager (GM): The quiz won’t just be normative. We’ll use it to test them, to evaluate their abilities.
        Trainer I (TRI): But, we didn.t tell them that. It.s not ethical.
        GM: Well, we don’t have to tell them it’s evaluative. It’s our test. We can use it for whatever we like.
        Academic manager (AM): If we don’t hire them, we do not need to tell them that it’s because they failed the test.
        [...]
        Field manager II (FMII): Holy shit. We are testing them and not telling them and then not hiring them. ... Sounds like lawsuit territory, huh?
        Trainer II (TRII): Yeah. Let’s just tell them. Be up front and like say we need to test your skills if you’re going to teach kids.
        [...]
        TRI: And what are we going to tell the DOE when they ask what qualifications our instructors have? They do ask, you know.
        GM: We don’t want teachers who fail the quiz, so it makes sense that we screen. I’m just not sure how legal it is to use the examination across the board to make decisions.
        (Koyama 2008: 172-173)|
  3. And also

    all the conversations that determine that only some schools are eligible for supplemental services, that produce the methods for identifying schools, and then identify the schools

    1. the 'Title' in the NCLB act
    2. Identifying "Schools in Need of Improvement" at the local level
      1. making the list
      2. notifying principals
      3. making the list available to the media and the parents
    3. And the dealing with the emerging consequences
      1. a school that is listed as a 'SINI' though it should not have been
        Teacher_1: We are a successful SINI that is failing?
        Teacher_2: Or are we a failing SINI because we are succeeding, excelling? [laughing throughout room]
        Teacher_1: Face it. We're succeeding and the DOE thinks we're failures.
        Principal: Actually, they [the DOE] know we met our AYP last year and this year.
        Teacher_3: So, why are we SINI again?
        [...]
        Principal: I'm frustrated too! We are a remarkable success here. All of you know that. I certainly know that. They [the DOE] say we need improvement because we failed to meet the ELA AYP, but we didn't….I don't want us to get hung up on labels. We know that we met the AYP and still we need to direct some energy into all the things that get thrown at us for being a SINI. We know how to do this, even if we don't want to, right?

        Nonetheless, for the next half hour, teachers worked to make sense of the SINI designation. The teachers focused on how to attend to the failure, w hich the students were not, in the aggregate, demonstrating. They decided to have the students do more concentrated vocabulary and arithmetic in small groups; to tutor individual students for a larger part of each day; and to make weekly benchmarks for their classes to meet. They were, as a group, addressing the failure as if they had not succeeded. ... They ... performed attending to failure and "passed" as a "failing school."
        (Koyama 2008: Chapter 8)
      2. parents who would rather have their school be a 'SINI' because of the extra services they get if it is so identified
        Lots of parents here work two or three jobs. Both parents, usually. So, having their kids in a safe educational environment allowed them more flexible and longer work schedules. By putting their kids in SES, they were able to pick them up at 5:30 instead of 3:30 and that’s got to be a big difference in work hours. Most of our parents are Mexican immigrants who want their children to succeed. So, you know they do what they think will help their kids. Like work more hours to provide for them and put them in tutoring… Parents aren’t going to stop this just because the school got off some list it was never on. Hey, if I had to work, I’d put Alyssa in SES too.
        (Koyama 2008: Chapter 8).