The Lived Experience of Market-Based School Reform: An Ethnographic Portrait of Teachers’ Policy Enactments in an Urban School

Abstract

In 2010, the Obama administration called for schools with low standardized test scores, often in high poverty, urban communities, to be targeted for rapid school improvement through reforms in teacher professional development, curriculum, and other areas. Since that time, many of schools deemed in need of improvement have experienced a vast array of reform mandates and intense pressure to put mandates into practice without delay. This article presents a critical policy analysis and an ethnographic portrait of the ways math teachers at a low-performing New Jersey public school make sense of multiple, often incoherent, policy mandates. Using a policy enactment lens, which highlights the discursive dimensions of policy and the significance of context, the author interrogates the ways national discourses—in particular, the promise of private companies’ research-based products and services and the teacher as bad or resistant—enter into the school and inform or delimit teachers’ policy enactments. The author provides a discriptive analysis of the institutional reform narrative based on interviews with school administrators. The author then draws on observation data from teachers’ meetings to show how teachers generally worked diligently to make mandates coherent within their institutional context, but their efforts were often frustrated by the inefficacy, inappropriateness, or sheer number of top-down mandates. Findings challenge conventional policy convergence studies that do not account for the ideological dimensions of enactment. Further, the study challenges conventional scholarly and popular perceptions of urban teachers as resistant to change.