The call for national and state-level educational standards has swept across the American educational scene in the last 15 years. Using a language of competition, fair play and equal treatment, standards advocates have captured a broad spectrum of both conservative and liberal support. Drawing upon journalistic reports, advocacy documents and interview data, this article presents an analysis of interconnected aspects of the evolution of educational reform discourse, in particular, advocacy from the leadership of a national teachers’ union and classroom teachers’ situated responses to ongoing changes. Critically appropriating from Fairclough’s analytic schema and commensurable concepts in Silverstein and Urban, I analyze interactional figures and socio-political themes involved in the elite and non-elite discourse of standards, with particular focus on the neo-liberal trope of a ‘new era of work’ and associated fears of increasing inequality. I conclude by assessing the differing strengths of the two frameworks as well as the role of discourse analysis more generally in critical social inquiry.
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