How to Punish What Really Works: Policy in Practice in a High-Achieving, High-Poverty School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 67
  In Roundtable Session: Education Policy in Theory and Practice: Consequences for Equitable Schooling

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of a high-achieving, high-poverty high school in Ohio, I look at how this school successfully negotiates the constraints of NCLB in ways that are perceived to support the achievement of students. I also assess how schooling actors feel simultaneously punished by specific district policies and programs instituted to meet the terms of NCLB that they viewed as undermining the successful curriculum and instruction practices at the school. Utilizing critical race theory and poststructural theory this critical case study demonstrates how schooling actors find opportunities for resistance, refashioning, or reification of policy structures through practice and a more nuanced view of “success that takes into account how race and class are also interweaved in this context.

Author

• Sara M. Childers, The University of Alabama