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Selling the Market : Educational Standards, Discourse and Social Inequality

James Collins Critique of Anthropology 2001 21: 143 DOI: 10.1177/0308275X0102100202 The online version of this article can be found at: http://coa.sagepub.com/content/21/2/143

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Article

Selling the Market

Educational Standards, Discourse and Social Inequality
James Collins
Department of Anthropology, University at Albany/SUNY

Abstract 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 Faircloughs analytic schema and commensurable concepts in Silverstein and Urban, I analyze interactional gures 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. Keywords discourse analysis neo-liberalism teachers unions United States

Introduction1
A call for national and state-level educational reform has swept across the United States for the last 15 years. It has not been a narrow pedagogical debate but instead has had general political resonance. As an article in the Atlantic Monthly noted:
During the 1980s the idea of raising standards in public education emerged as a national cause and as an establishing issue for a certain kind of centrist politician. It provided the opportunity to demonstrate that the liberal impulse to offer opportunity to all and the conservative impulse to demand high performance could be joined. Among the people who used education reform to get onto the national stage were Bill and Hillary Clinton, in Arkansas, and Ross Perot, who was the head of a state commission on the subject, in Texas. (Lemann, 1997: 128)2

It remains to be seen whether opportunity to all can be provided in pedagogies and assessments which ignore social differences; new standards may
Vol 21(2) 143163 [0308-275X(200106)21:2; 143163;016275] Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

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simply reinforce the familiar inequalities of educational achievement by income and race. Indeed, a notable feature of the standards movement as it has developed over time is that initial commitments to resource equity resources necessary to create a level [educational] playing eld have been abandoned as particular initiatives have been developed and implemented (Natriello, 1996). Despite skirmishes over whether there should be national achievement testing or national standards, the idea that there should be some mandated common framework for curriculum and assessment in all schools at the state if not the federal level has wide appeal in the United States. It is an appeal that crosses party lines, uniting Democrats and Republicans at the national and state level; it has the active endorsement of the leadership of national teachers unions, especially the AFT; and it garners praise from nationally syndicated columnists such as arch-conservative Thomas Sowell and liberal Gary Wills. In short, it is an elite consensus, and it has resulted in sweeping changes: in the last 15 years, all states in the USA have implemented some form of higher standards for curriculum and assessment. Although there is a substantial critical literature about the standards movement, little attention has been given to the forms of language used in constructing the new consensus or to the problem of relating alternative perspectives to the dominant view. In what follows I will present such an analysis, examining standards advocacy documents and grassroots teachers responses, focusing on the contradiction of a rhetoric of equality vs. wellknown facts of increasing social inequality and on the ways in which writers and speakers position themselves in an ongoing debate. I will argue that discourse analysis, in particular critical and anthropological frameworks, can contribute to our understanding of the nature of the appeal of standards, the diffusion of inuential arguments, and the resonance of standards rhetoric with broad socio-political developments. The important question, of course, is whether discourse analysis provides privileged theoretical and analytical guidance to our search for understanding.

Analytic frameworks
Faircloughs well-known arguments about language and power and about critical discourse analysis or CDA (1992, 1995) propose three analytic levels, one of which derives from traditions of linguistic analysis, the other two from contemporary social analysis. Although the terms have shifted over the years, Faircloughs schema calls for analysis of the textual, the discursive and the society-wide (the postulation of such levels is distinct from the epistemological concern with interpretation and explanation which Slembrouck and Verschueren address elsewhere in COA 21[1]). The textual level involves interpretation of words, their sense, connotation and metaphorical associations, analysis of certain syntactic features, especially grammatical

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voice, and analysis of interactional features such as turn-taking. The discursive level involves analysis of conditions of production and interpretation of text, extending beyond the lexical and syntactic to explore what other traditions call context: participants social and communication-event roles, inter-textual associations in discourse, and the actual or presumptive distribution of texts (Gumperz and Hymes, 1986). The society-wide level involves analysis of institutionally dened personae in typical encounters (such as the doctor and patient, the policeman and suspect); the interpretation of pervasive if somewhat indistinct discourse genres (such as therapy/counseling talk, advertising and ofcialese); and paying attention to very general social-semiotic processes, such as marketization. The value of the CDA approach is that it calls for and provides some guidance for simultaneously investigating textual detail, situated practice and society-wide development that is, the combining of linguistic analysis, interpretative analysis of social practice and macrosociological concerns with structure. Its weakness is that actual analyses are often removed from ethnographic or institutional context and thus vulnerable to extensive counter-interpretation (Verschueren, COA 21[1]; Widdowson, 1998). Since it comes from a tradition of linguistic anthropology that has had little engagement with CDA, it is interesting that Natural Histories of Discourse (NHD) (Silverstein and Urban, 1996) shares analytic afnities with Fairclough. An edited volume which self-consciously grapples with the role of text in social and cultural analysis, NHD contains many contributions which are concerned with the dynamics of authority and power in language use and several (including one by this author) concerned with analysis of bureaucratic institutions in the United States or Europe. In the introduction to this book, Silverstein and Urban present a tripartite schema of analysis, which various contributors exemplify in their particular case studies, and which is useful as a general overview of the approach taken. This schema distinguishes between referential, interactional and metadiscursive levels. Following the terminology of Silversteins chapter (1996), I will refer to these as denotational text, interactional text, and metadiscursive frame. The denotational text is roughly equivalent to Faircloughs text. It comprises strict, literal or referential meaning; it has to do with what a text actually says in everyday parlance; and it entails the analysis of lexical and syntactic contributions to some extended stretch of discourse deemed a text. The interactional text is approximate to Faircloughs discursive practice. As its name suggests, interactional text has to do with speech-event or communicative-act personae, that is, with real or construable sources (speakers and writers, authors, bearers of the word) and addressees (hearers and readers, audiences, receivers of communications). It concerns the complex positioning that potential interlocutors can take vis-a-vis what is actually inscribed or spoken and, conversely, how what is actually inscribed or spoken is affected by those real and potential interactants (see Irvine, 1996, for a thorough discussion). Metadiscursive frames are authoritative guides

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or struggles to impose authoritative guides for interpreting unfolding communicative events and their text-artifacts. Such frames may comprise the interlinked sense of genre and authoritative tradition found in many small-scale or traditional social formations (what is often called ritual language; Bloch, 1975; Brenneis and Myers, 1986), or they may be ofcially sanctioned bureaucratic concepts and practices in, say, the modern normalization of sexuality or intelligence (Mehan, 1996). Metadiscursive frames are, in their generality, roughly comparable to Faircloughs social practice or society-wide level of analysis. Although this summary is also very schematic, the strength of the culture-as-discourse approach as articulated in NDH is that it also devotes attention to linguistic detail, situational or ethnographic analysis, and problems of scale, that is, the analysis of societywide ideologies and institutions. Its shortcomings are the converse of Faircloughs: many contributions give short shrift to the relation between social theory and the project of discursive-cum-ethnographic analysis, leaving society-wide analyses historically and sociologically ungrounded.

Case I: American Educator articles

Let me now turn to the issue at hand, the call for educational reform that has unfolded in the United States in the last two decades. In the analysis that follows I will focus on two primary sources: rst, articles in the American Educator, the ofcial magazine of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), as they develop a consensus about the need for educational standards of a certain kind; and second, the response of classroom teachers to the call for standards. I chose this focus, rather than, say, the documents produced by political or corporate elites, because the developing AFT line on standards was intended to negotiate a consensus. It sought to persuade the highly organized workforce of US primary and secondary teachers, those who would (and will) bear the brunt of putting the textual proposals into practice, of both the virtue and inevitability of standards reform. The American Educator is the agship publication of the AFT, which has been the national teachers union most vocal source in support of the standards movement. It has, in the words of one of my interviewees, kept up a steady drumbeat for standards. In order to gain a sense of perspective on how the mid-1990s consensus in the Educator emerged, I looked at 13 years of the publication, from 1984 to 1997. In the pages of the Educator in the mid-1980s we nd initial articles about the need to reform schooling and, more especially, the profession of teaching, with proposals for national teacher testing and certication boards, and we nd initial positions taken in what was to become the debate about a common knowledge base for schooling, notably some of E.D. Hirschs (1987) early arguments about cultural literacy. But we also nd articles openly critical of the content of teacher tests, many articles concerned with aspects of student-centered

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learning, and articles addressing the likelihood of decentralizing school and curriculum administration. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, we see the outlines of a new AFT agenda forming around the banner of standards: there are articles calling for curriculum standards; there are articles making invidious comparisons between US education and that of the nations that are the USs primary economic rivals ( Japan and the lead nations of Europe); and, related to this, there are articles arguing for a tight link between education, productivity and the labor market. By the mid-1990s, what we might call the AFT consensus on standards has emerged. It is largely in reaction to and agreement with other national summits and documents, such as the President Bush-initiated and Clintonimplemented Goals 2000 program and the governors-led National Education Summit (Summit, 1996). In American Educator at mid-decade we nd numerous articles promoting standards reform. In these articles there is an incessant linking of school performance to adult jobs; there are frequent international comparisons, decrying the low state of American student performance; and the new, proposed standards are presented as providing both equality of opportunity and accountability.3 Below I will examine in detail one particular article in the American Educator (AE) in order to give a sense of the particular rhetorics involved in the developing union platform. It is an early article by Albert Shanker, the president of AFT, who, in the early 1980s, had embraced the education reform movement that emerged during the rst term of Ronald Reagan. In the analysis that follows, I will attend only briey to the content of text, which largely agrees with the summary of the AE position just given. I will focus instead on interactional features of text, particularly the use of pronouns and reported speech, for they reveal a specic and savvy orientation to the voice of the other. They also suggest a precise linkage to the general discursive frame. Albert Shanker was an inuential public intellectual, in large part because he was president of the AFT for more than 25 years, and he wrote and spoke extensively on the subject of educational reform and standards. In order to explore the discursive aspects of his advocacy for educational standards, I will examine in detail one early essay on school reform, Our Profession, Our Schools: The Case for Fundamental Reform (Shanker, 1986). In this essay the AFT leader continues an earlier argument about the need for the AFT and its more than 1 million members to join the elite-led movement for reforming schools by raising educational standards. In addition to the overt content, which links school reform to economic transformation, the essay also makes an interesting use of personal pronouns such as I, we and you. These pronouns play a central role in constructed quotations, both Shankers and those of other labor leaders, which are interspersed through this and other essays. Our Profession, Our Schools begins in a prophetic vein by announcing, Once in a great while, and usually spurred by crisis, a combination of

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forces and ideas come together in a way that makes real change possible (1986: 11). First among the forces and ideas Shanker mentions is the national report, A Nation at Risk (NCEE, 1983), an opening salvo in the war for standards reform, which was followed by a dozen other reports in a few years; also among the forces are Gallup polls showing that Each year, a higher and higher percentage of the American people gave low or mediocre marks to the schools (1986: 11). The response of AFT leadership was to join the debate with, as Shanker puts it, an open and welcome attitude toward school reform. This attitude, in turn, has evoked a tremendously positive response from governors, state legislatures, and the business community (1986: 11). The political and economic elite had now, it seems, embraced the AFT. Even more strikingly, they addressed the AFT in a catchy mixture of demotic and formal styles. When reform conferences or task forces were contemplated, thoughts immediately turned to the AFT. Or so it seems on the strength of Shankers rst quote: (1) The rewards of partnership
More often than not, we are now called in at the very beginning and we are told: You people took a responsible and courageous position three years ago. Without you, this entire reform effort would have been destroyed or seriously hampered. From now on we dont want to make any moves without bringing you in as partners. (Shanker, 1986: 12, emphasis added)

For anyone troubled by old reports of Reaganite class warfare, this quote summons up a reassuring image of labormanagement collaboration. The exact source of the quote we are left to surmise, but the voice who addresses the we of the AFT leadership and membership must be the collective voice of those governors, legislators and business interests earlier mentioned. This elite voice is pleased with the AFT, it seems, attributing a central role in reform to the union, and making rm commitments to partnership. Note also how this elite voice speaks with conversational directness: it addresses the AFT leadership and by implication the entire membership as You people and ends with the colloquial here-and-now of From now on we dont want to make any moves without bringing you in as partners. This reported voice is, of course, a ction. Perhaps it represents the content of a conversation or set of conversations Shanker had with policy conference participants, or perhaps it is simply a pleasing device to advance his argument, but it is presented as a voice directly rendered, that is, a quote. This representational device, the made-up quote, is also familiar to us from everyday conversation: we all insert other voices into our discourse, varying greatly in how and whether we mark or blur the line between our speech and other speech (Bakhtin, 1981; Rampton, COA 21[1]; Tannen, 1989). The constructed quote is familiar to us also from the written sources, for example, newspaper columnists. The journalistic gure of the contrived

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populist is well-known, a Mike Royko, for example, who frequently quotes to us voices, in humor and seriousness, which we know are made-up, but the voices somehow add to the verisimilitude of the account and to the columnists persona as a guy on the street. Shankers articles and essays use the faux quotes frequently, at times for quite serious rhetorical work, such as to present evidence for arguments in the form of stories involving real people who engage the narrator in direct dialogue. In other early articles advocating school reform, Shanker (1985) links the need for educational reform to fundamental changes in the economy, following with a story that dramatizes the point about economic change. Nor is Shanker the only labor leader to use such ventriloquism to enliven the message of economic change. In Our Profession, Our Schools the shop-oor story discussed below is not one of Shankers own devising. Rather, he uses a story told by Edgar L. Ball, then international secretary for the United Steelworkers of America when Ball, Shanker and other national union leaders had met with a group of university presidents during a national Roundtable on Labor and Higher Education (Shanker, 1986: 14). Balls story recycled in Shankers essay concerns an aluminum plant in the state of Arkansas, a factory previously marked by adversarial relations between workers and management, then redesigned to bring about a new collaborative spirit. We know that this happy outcome occurred because the shop-oor workers tell us so. Or at least they seem to do so, for the heart of Balls account is a long quoted exchange between himself and an unnamed group of factory workers. I have excerpted the story in example 2 in order to show the quoted sections. As in example 1, the rst and second person pronouns are in bold type. (2) Excerpt of story about factory reorganization
I talked to a group of employees in the rst department that tried the new system. The rst three months the plan was in effect, down-time was reduced by half, and within the next three months decreased by half again. I asked them Why? How did you do it? And this is what they said: What we used to do was come to work, punch time cards, go to our work station, and stand there until the foreman came by and told us what to do. If he didnt tell us to do something that needed to be done, we didnt do it. If he wasnt there enough, that was his fault, he was the boss. If he told us to do it wrong, we did it wrong even if we knew it was wrong, because we were subject to discharge if we didnt do what he told us to do. If something went wrong, after we knew it was going wrong with the equipment or process, we didnt say anything to anyone about it. If the foreman happened to come by and catch it, ne. If he didnt, we let it go. If equipment broke down, we shut the power off. We didnt call anybody. We stood there until someone from management came by and looked at it, and they had to decide to call maintenance. When maintenance got there, we didnt tell them. If they knew how to x it, ne, and if they xed it wrong, too bad, that wasnt our concern. We werent being paid to do those things. We were being paid to do the few little things that were in our job description and thats all we did.

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150 Critique of Anthropology 21(2) I asked, What are you doing now? Their reply: We know how to run the plant. We come to work; we start operating it. We are running maintenance even though its not in our job description. We help each other. If one is having trouble, we help. If we think something is going to go wrong, we plan around that and we alert maintenance in advance and we have them there and we tell them whats wrong, and we show them and we help them x it. (cited in Shanker, 1986: 1415, emphasis added)

What is appealing at the level of textual content should be clear enough in this representation. The old, wasteful intransigence of adversarial labor in which workers punch time cards and stand there until told . . . what to do is replaced by a new work order in which those workers know how to run the plant, run maintenance even though its not [their] job and help each other. However, I do not want to dwell on these thematic or referential-textual contrasts. Instead, I want to discuss how the interaction of pronouns and reported discourse gives a poetic structure that orders the contrast of the bad old and the good new. By poetic I mean the pervasive structuring of discourse by partial and complete repetition, long ago noted by Jakobson (1960) and subsequently analyzed in a variety of vernacular conversation and narrative forms (Hymes, 1996; Tannen, 1989). Interactional text In the case at hand, this aspect of form can be better discerned by emphasizing the patterning of question and response within the quoted sections. These I have schematized in example 3 using verbs of question and response to frame major units and organizing parallel series of commonsubject clauses and sentences: (3) Schematization of reported speech and we-clauses in story of factory reform: A I talked to a group . . . I asked them Why? How did you do it? This is what they said What we [workers] used to do [we] come to work [we] punch time cards [we] go to our work stations [we] stand there until the foreman came by and told us what to do if he didnt tell us to do something we didnt do it if he wasnt there that was his fault

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if he told us to do it wrong we did it wrong ... If something went wrong we didnt say If the foreman caught it, ne If he didnt we didnt If the equipment broke we shut the power off we didnt call we stood there We didnt call anybody We stood there When maintenance got there, we didnt tell we didnt help If they knew how to x it, ne If they xed it wrong, too bad that wasnt our concern We werent being paid to do those things We were being paid to do the few little things . . . B I asked What are you doing now? Their reply We know how to run the plant We come to work we start running it We are running maintenance We help each other If one is having trouble, we help If we think something is going wrong we plan around that we alert maintenance we have them there we tell them whats wrong we show them we help them x it

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In this example, the before and after states (A and B) are framed by Balls query I asked them and the collective workers response This is what they said or Their reply. In the workers rst response, they begin with a veclause sequence What we used to do . . .. This is followed by a long series of negative conditionals: sentences beginning with if are paired with a clause reporting some non-desirable behavior, often in sets of three pairs (e.g. If he didnt tell us what to do, we didnt do it). In the nal section B, after the second I ask/They reply couplet, the anonymous workers present several sequences of we clauses which form a positive-contrast parallel to the conditionals and negative outcomes reported in the initial paragraph (compare the ve-clause we sequence that opens section B with the ve-clause sequence that opens A). The second of the worker response sections closes with a seven-clause sequence, which begins If we think something is going wrong, and then lists their responses in a pair of three clause sets (We plan, alert, have them there; we tell, show how, help them), which specify the engaged, productive new work relations. A society-wide metadiscursive frame What are we to make of such represented discourse? First, we should note that although it is presented as a direct quote there is little indication of how it was obtained in order to permit the presumed accuracy of . . . . In short, as with Shankers initial example, it is a story told as a conversation, a form familiar from studies of myth (Collins, 1987; Hymes, 1981). Second, we should note its formal symmetry, which suggests a polished, often-told tale, as folklorists have shown (Bauman, 1986). Such formal intricacy in language use is not uncommon, but it is artful, in a low-key, vernacular fashion (Gee, 1996; Hymes, 1996; Tannen, 1989). What is distinctive in this case, however, is that the vernacular poetics is being used to dramatize and give voice to a vision of a new work order (Gee et al., 1996) and so we join interactional text with a metadiscursive frame of society-wide signicance. In this new economic era workers collaborate closely with management. By implication, given Shankers recontextualization of the talk, rank-and-le teachers imaginatively join hands with the governors and business people of elite-led educational reform. In this story, constructed out of imagined everyday voices, a virtual interactional text unfolds. I, you and we are layered: workers, managers, Ball, Shanker, we-the-readers; I is Ball asking and Shanker arguing, we are factory workers, the AFT, readers-and-author. Like all texts, this tale seeks a sympathetic reader/listener. It offers to draw in readers, insofar as they would identify with those voices or grant them a special authenticity, offering readers places as imaginary participants in a faux dialogue I ask/They reply about a brave new world of work. Pursuing an analysis of metadiscursive frame and society-wide signicance, we should ask: what is this story about? Why is it told as it is told? Why does it appear in the essay Our Profession? Do we have a case of the

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workers voices at the service of a neo-liberal message about the virtues of deregulated workplaces and the irrelevance of class conict? It would appear so, at least in the deft rhetoric of national and international union leaders. Such leaders use the rhetoric of faux quotes to mediate their contradictory position, as aspiring partners of university presidents, governors and the business community, and also as the voice of the working people they organizationally represent. In this way textual form contributes to the social practice of disseminating a society-wide new consensus about possibilities, alliances and struggles recall that Shanker heard this particular tale at a national Labor and Higher Education Roundtable. Interactional text suggests a metadiscursive frame we are all equal participants in the new smart economy. In the indexically ambiguous reference of we and you, there is a rapid blending and doubling of labor leaders and business interests, workers and leaders, the AFT and teachers, pointing to and telling happy stories about the contradictions of autonomy and control, for factory workers and classroom teachers.

Case II: Teachers responses

But who hears the happy stories and what do they make of them? Thus far I have developed an analysis of textual features and interactional dimensions of two written texts. Written texts, of course, always leave open the question of how they are read. A straightforward question is to ask What about reader response? Since there is no provision for letters to the editor in American Educator, we are deprived of an obvious source of data on this question. However, when classroom teachers were queried about standards reform and the national union, the question of we grew more complex. What follows is based on interviews I conducted with six teachers, from primary, middle and high school, in the City of Albany School District in New York State. The interviews were open-ended but structured around questions about the effects of standards on classroom practices, the potential benets and drawbacks of standards-driven curriculum and assessment, and the interviewees sources of information about standards reform. The interviewees were selected opportunistically, from people I knew from having a child in the district, participating in activities such as the citys youth soccer program and teaching in a local university. Interviewees were probably somewhat younger and more overtly concerned about education issues than their peers in the district. The analysis addresses text-content themes, then turns to interactional features, before discussing the framing or society-wide resonances of the teachers accounts. In discussing text content I select excerpts to illustrate themes. This conventional, generalizing strategy is used because it provides straightforward accounts of what some teachers, often left out of the debate, are saying about standards. In analyzing interactional text, I will

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note some shared practices but then focus on a particular interview, in which pronoun use will be analyzed, providing a contrast with the Shanker/Ball case just discussed. Denotational text In responses to questions about whether they read union periodicals such as the American Educator and where they heard about standards reforms, these teachers provided a nuanced but consistent characterization of a reactive union stance. As one person put the matter when asked why the local union supported standards change: Its not gonna go away . . . Teachers want respect as professionals . . . [but] if they dont show leadership, everyone will say Where are the teachers? . That is, the pressure for educational changes via standards was irresistible, and so the union had to act. Another held the opinion that unions were not leading standards reform; instead, they joined the general rhetoric but were actually concerned with practical stuff : The [union] rhetoric is Lets have higher standards, lets have professional development . . . but who pays for it? According to another, the style of reporting in union publications had shifted in recent years. Whereas previously such publications had featured some debate about standards, currently they accepted the curriculum and testing changes as a fait accompli. Of union publications she said, Now its anecdotes . . . about how someone in a classroom is doing [in response to new curriculum or assessments] . . .. Only a teacher committed to a distinct educational alternative saw the AFT as providing leadership, but from his perspective, it was the wrong leadership. As this teacher put it: When Shanker hears about Essential Schools all he says is Its too vague. When asked about potential losses as well as gains in standards reform a topic frankly addressed in American Educator articles in the early 1980s but given scant attention in the 1990s the interviewees were quick to identify losses and gains for teachers as well as for students. In the interest of space, I will focus on the latter. For one respondent, the gains for students included a potential increase in equality, which echoes a consistent theme of the literature advocating standards reforms. A teacher of students from non-English speaking backgrounds held a similar view and provided an example of valuable change. She felt that the new state-wide curriculum frameworks and tests would encourage a change in teachers perspectives on Limited English Prociency (LEP) students, disrupting an academic ghetto of low expectations and classroom neglect in which such students languished. This was because the pressure of new curricula and new tests raised teachers awareness of LEP issues and of the special needs of these linguistically diverse populations. As she argued, the new environment caused more teachers to realize that these [LEP] students are intelligent, can be held to high standards. All respondents, however, also expressed the gains of standards-driven

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reform in terms of social class advantage. One interviewee, who wondered aloud about a new and demanding English test for fourth and eighth graders, asked who the [new] test is for. She later answered her rhetorical question with a single word, Niskayuna, naming one of the areas most afuent suburbs, the site of General Electrics major research and development complex. The ESL instructor argued that the change to mandated higher standards was primarily a middle-class reform and that those who already have it it being a solid academic preparation would get a better education. The potential losses for students were also expressed in terms of the looming presence of social class. As one experienced teacher and long-term education advocate put it: If you say Im putting the bar up higher and dont provide the resources [you will have] higher rates of kids who arent going to make it. Two other teachers provided statistical illustrations of how the new high school exit requirements would affect students who were from non-English-speaking backgrounds or who were members of ethnoracial minorities. The rst illustration, provided by an ESL instructor, consisted of the observation that in the 1999 Regents Exam in English, newly required for all New York seniors but with a special dispensation for linguistic minority students, only 40 percent of LEP-classied students took the exam, and of those 40 percent, only 50 percent passed the exam.4 What such gures mean is that of the total LEP population, only 20 percent (50 percent 40 percent) passed the test that would qualify them for a high school diploma under New York States new criteria. Assume a worst-case scenario little or no change in the preparation of linguistic minority students for the Regents Exam and you would have catastrophic failure rates for this population in the near future The second illustration was provided during an interview with a high school instructor. He reported retention and graduation numbers for the citys high school. Because of their complexity, they are summarized in Table 1. In the table enrollment rates for each grade are given (rounded to the nearest hundred), as are the graduation and Regents test-passing rates (rounded to the nearest ten). Important for making sense of these gures is that the Regents Diploma used to be required only of those pursuing an academic track, that is, four-year college-preparatory programs. Under the new standards, however, the Regents Diploma is to be required of all students, beginning in the year 2000. With that in mind, there are two things to observe from these numbers. First, there is a very low retention-and-graduation rate for those entering ninth grade class: only 220 out of 700 (31 percent) reach the twelfth grade and graduate. Second, since two-thirds of the freshman class are minorities (450 out of 700), it is striking that only 30 minority students received a Regents Diploma in 1999. What these numbers suggest is that if nothing changed that is, if the new, high-stakes standards are put in place without a signicant change in the preparation of these

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Table 1

High school retention, graduation and Regents Diplomas

Total number of students 700 500 400 300 220 120 Total minority students 450

Grade level students 9 10 11 12 Graduation Regents Diploma

30

working-class, minority students for the exams then more than 90 percent would be expected to fail or drop out.5 Interactional Text I have thus far discussed certain themes in teachers text, in particular, their responses to calls for standards reform and the specic assessment and curricular changes resulting from those calls. In doing so, I have viewed these teachers as the potential, though not actual, we of Shankers rhetoric of standards reform.6 Let me now turn directly to the teachers interactional text or discourse practice. Several features were salient, though in the interests of space I will have to treat these briey. First, the interviews always involved an initial negotiation of what the topic was, that is, of how the term standards was to be interpreted. As should be clear by now, the concept and discourse of raising educational standards has multiple meanings.7 Interviewees took my initial request to talk with them about efforts and calls to raise educational standards as an opening to talk about various things, among them (a) a new, rigid reading program in a local elementary school, (b) an effort to create an alternative high school, and (c) a new state-wide curriculum. Second, like the labor leaders discussed earlier, teacher interviewees also quoted the voices of others. We have already seen a number of these represented voices; in example 4 they are listed by ostensible source and with reported discourse in italics: (4) The voices of others
Generic voices who call for reform: Its not gonna go away . . . Teachers want respect as professionals . . . [but] if they [and their organizations] dont show leadership, everyone will say Where are the teachers? If you say Im putting the bar up higher and dont provide the resources [you will have] higher rates of kids who arent going to make it. Unions and labor leaders: The [union] rhetoric is Lets have higher standards, lets have professional development . . . but who pays for it? When Shanker hears about Essential Schools all he says is Its too vague.

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157 Collins: Educational Standards and Inequality Other teachers: [of cynical colleagues response to the call for standards] They just say Itll pass.

In addition, teachers also used pronouns to summon an audience as well as restrict or widen the scope of their claims. This can be seen by examining excerpts from a particular interview. Early in this interview the respondent, AA, uses yknow extensively, in a classic bid to establish a common intersubjective frame of reference. (5) Situating self in interviews: yknow AA: Umm . . . I think mostly Im informed through the district . . . yknow they send out . . . things pretty regularly about whats up [JC: Ok] . . . whats expected yknow the district created this um core curriculum the past couple of years, how one incorporates the standards [JC: uh huh] . . . So, I get the districts perspective on it . . . But I also, yknow, keep up on a couple of journals myself . . . which um . . . yknow, keep me informed too I . . . [JC: uh huh] . . . I subscribe to Rethinking Schools . . . JC: Oh, you do get that . . . AA: Yeah, so its kind of like, yknow, the other side of things [JC: Yeah] . . . um [JC: Yeah] . . . So thats very helpful Note that the yknows work: my backchannel uh huhs and yeahs are frequent and appropriately timed, suggesting a smooth interaction. Both AA and myself had felt that the interview went well. AAs interview is also interesting, for comparative purposes, in its use of we. Unlike the writerly use of royal or editorial we, AA always used the pronoun to refer to specic collectivities with which she was involved, for example, the teachers in her district (she sat on a district-wide committee) and the children in her classroom. The only exception to this pattern occurred when she broached the issue of the general goals of education, when she used a generalizing we. Both uses can be seen in example 6: (6) Expanding self: specic and general we Specic we [teachers in the district]: Well, for example . . . yknow we just this last year we got this new language arts um . . . assessment that we have to do on each kid in our classroom . . . Specic we [members of the particular classroom]: I just make like a game out of it, like Were gonna do a test and . . . and we just like, whatever, do the test and we get on with our business. General we [teachers and schools in the project of education]: Who are we creating them to be as people? I think that is much more important . . . I feel like building a community is a primary goal in here and thats what were creating.

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158 Critique of Anthropology 21(2)

What these interactional traits imply is that interviews, like published documents, involve a complex work of orientation. Interviewees (and interviewers) must establish a place or position from which they speak, a footing (Goffman, 1981). In addition, others are always potentially co-present as an interviewer, a joint respondent, or the diverse, imaginary, yet quotable social others in terms of whom we align our utterances (Bakhtin, 1981). However, there is a notable difference between the union leaders and the teachers. The latter, at least in this event that is, when discussing standards in a semi-formal setting are parsimonious in their use of reported speech and generalizing pronouns. They evoke the voices of social others, but in brief sayings; they do not construct elaborate dialogues. They use pronouns to situate and to generalize, but in ways attuned to the circumstances of speech and with more circumspection about speaking for others. A metadiscursive frame When we turn to consider a metadiscursive frame for the teachers talk, it was ostensibly standards and educational reform, but there were numerous differences from elite standards advocacy. Unlike the AFT and government documents on standards, these teachers did not emphasize the link between skills and the economy. They were more attuned, as a group, to the complex, often contradictory, relation between efforts at accountability and equality, and they did not view this relation as a xed dichotomy. Nor did they talk about standards as a unied set of ideas or processes. They cited particular programs and linked the history of standards reforms to state-wide political conditions for example, the election of a conservative Republican governor in New York State in 1994 changed the terms of debate about educational reform.8 As noted, they were quite sensitive to the stratifying implications of raising the bar without providing the resources; indeed, their statistical stories can be understood as alarms about just that possibility.

Conclusion: critique in an age of uncertainties

The appeal of standards-driven reform is powerful but ambivalent. It includes a familiar and worthy call for greater equality, linked to apprehension of long-standing obstacles to such equality . For elites dominating the discussion, standards rhetoric resonates with the language of new capitalism, an image of skilled populations performing smart work in nonhierarchical arrangements. But capitalism requires control of labor, however inserted into the labor process, and the new, neo-liberal work order also promises greater insecurity and inequality as society-wide features (Bauman, 1997; Bourdieu, 1998). Many people, including the classroom teachers interviewed in this study, seem to have intimations of this dystopian system potential.

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159 Collins: Educational Standards and Inequality

Understanding an ongoing large-scale change, like that represented by numerous standards reform efforts in the US, is an open-ended process. The justications for, fears about and apparent results of such changes are open to much debate and are part of a wider political-discursive eld. For example, in the ten months since an initial draft of this article was prepared, there have been a series of reports about the unacceptably high rates of failure on the revamped New York State assessments. State legislators have met to discuss the standards and whether they should be amended (Brownstein, 1999; Karlin, 1999). Troubled schools in New York City were exposed for inating their test scores (Hartocollis, 1999). And the state Commissioner of Education, who had led the drive for new standards, was testifying on behalf of lawsuits seeking to redress glaring inequalities in local school funding.9 Across the nation, the standards movement has led to extensive changes in curriculum and especially in the imposition of highstakes testing, and it has begun to generate a grassroots opposition. Loose coalitions of parents, students, civil rights organizations and independent teachers in various large states Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Texas have begun lobbying legislators, ling lawsuits and organizing test boycotts (Editors, 1999; FairTest, 2000; Ross, 2000; Schmidt, 2000); some, such as the one in the Detroit schools this past spring, have been quite dramatic (Gibson, 2000). I have tried in the foregoing to show how discourse analysis could offer a critical entre to this dynamic social arena. Proposing a schematic synthesis of two inuential approaches to discourse analysis, I have suggested a line of approach to a complex discursive formation, arguing that paying detailed attention to the rhetoric of standards in key institutional texts (essays calling for standards in national union publications) and to the response of members of the ostensible audience of those texts (in this case, classroom teachers) can provide insight into the interplay of the content of texts, the real and virtual patterns of interaction they occasion, and the more general discursive frames and social practices they evoke and instantiate. Most basically, an orientation to discourse should remind us that what we might abstractly understand as systemic processes or social-structural dynamics are expressed in familiar idioms: arguments made, stories told, warnings given, senses of audience evoked and manipulated. Here we see a clear strength of the NHD approach over CDA: the formers sense of interactional dimensions, variously mediated, is much richer and more sophisticated than CDAs analyses to date. This is signicant because it reminds us, as the preceding analysis conrms, that all texts, written or spoken, are the precipitates of complex interactional positionings, positionings which often evoke wider frames of interpretation. The issue of wider frames brings to light, however, a strength of CDA. Both the elite and non-elite discourses analyzed above show a preoccupation with the imaginable economic effects of schooling with labor leaders and other elites

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160 Critique of Anthropology 21(2)

telling tales of neo-liberal progress; teachers and diverse test-opponents giving warnings and citing gures. In characterizing this tension between neo-liberalism and what the French call la fracture sociale, CDAs constructs of social practice/society-wide analysis give more leverage. Frankly drawing on concepts from the Marxian tradition, such as hegemony, CDAs social practice orients us to overt and covert conicts, involving the linkages of ideas, economics and political positions found in the standards movement. In addition, via concepts such as marketization, CDA attempts to theorize tendencies within late capitalist/late modern social formations such as the pervasiveness of market processes and idioms, the contested terrain of public institutions which are quite evident in the discourses of standards and school reform. NHDs metadiscursive frame is a more neutral category as to historical or sociological position, gaining perhaps greater descriptive potential, but offering less theoretical purchase in the case at hand. Neo-liberalism was the dominant political and economic orthodoxy in the 1990s and remains so today, both nationally and internationally. As the current hegemony, it may be accepted on its own terms as the vision of the only possible society, a reformable if not perfect society (Giddens, 1998); or it may be challenged as an elite political-discursive effort to hide the social fractures of a complacent late capitalism, as critics contend (Bourdieu, 1998; Singer, 1999). However, even if we agree that neo-liberalism needs criticism and that analysis of texts and discursive practices can advance that critical goal, we are left to deal with the complexity and dynamism of the social phenomena we would understand. The theoretical and analytical tools we need for such tasks are not given in advance. Replying to the question raised at the beginning of this article, discourse analysis frameworks do not offer a privileged theoretical perspective on the contemporary world. Put more sharply, both NHD/linguistic anthropology and CDA are inadequate for a general account of the discursive-and-social. Perhaps, that is how they are intended. In both frameworks, discourse is explicitly presented as something not separable from society. Perhaps like the concept of culture (Kuper, 1999), discourse is best understood as always-already entangled in the political and economic, that is, as insufcient on its own. Discourse analysis can and should, however, be part of a critical orientation to the postmodern era we now inhabit in which there appear to be no absolute foundations for knowledge, no sure programs for the future, and no certainty about the relation of critic and world (Anderson, 1998; Bauman, 1997). It is in that spirit that the preceding argument has been offered.

Notes
1 Based on a paper originally presented in the session The Relevance of Critique in Discourse Analysis at the 98th Annual Meeting of the American

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161 Collins: Educational Standards and Inequality Anthropological Association, Chicago, IL, 20 November 1999. I am indebted to Peter Johnston for initial impetus to begin this line of analysis, to members of the FWO Onderzoeks-gemeenschap Taal, macht en identiteit/Research Group on Language, Power and Identity for encouragement and conversation, to the Albany school teachers who agreed to be interviewed, to Mary Bucholtz for comments on the conference paper, and to Ben Rampton, Rebecca Rogers, Karen Sykes and Jan Blommaert for comments on later written versions. On the cusp of a US presidential election, we would now add the names of Al Gore and George W. Bush to those who used education reform to get onto the national stage. For example, the American Educator had special issues in spring 1994 on World Class Standards, invidiously comparing American college exams to European and Japanese exams; in fall of that same year, it had another special issue devoted to Revitalizing our Schools, which presented what has become the magazines position on national curriculum frameworks; spring of 1996 devoted another special issue to New Life for the Standards Movement, repeating and elaborating the arguments made in 1994 and providing a set of authoritative guidelines for state-by-state devising of standards. Subsequent to the interview, the interviewee supplied a fax copy of her source for the gures: copies of gures from a report to the New York State EnglishLanguage Learners Advisory Group, originally part of Item for Discussion for the Board of Regents Committee on Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education. Prepared under the signature of James A. Kadamus, Deputy Commissioner, Ofce of Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education (New York State), 14 October 1999. Of course, things will not remain exactly the same. As the Regents Diplomas are required of all students, then the great majority who have heretofore chosen the less academically demanding Local Diploma will henceforth have to shift to the Regents. What the teachers statistics emphasize is how few are currently prepared to do so. Potential not actual, since no respondents appeared to read American Educator regularly. The state AFT publication New York Teacher does appear to have been read more often. Indeed, it may be, as Urciuoli (1999) characterizes the term multiculturalism, a strategically deployable shifter, that is, a term with relatively little inherent semantic content, which allows contending parties to talk about different things while appearing to talk about the same thing. As one respondent put it, [after the governors election] we went from the compact for learning to standards and from standards to exams . He argued, quite reasonably, that low-income districts must have more resources, not fewer, than the afuent districts with which they are supposed to compete (Roy, 1999).

2 3

6 7

8 9

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James Collins is Professor of Anthropology and Reading at the University at Albany/SUNY. He is an anthropologist and linguist whose primary research efforts have been in critical studies of language and education and Native American languages and cultures. His recent publications include Understanding Tolowa Histories and Culture, Dream, and Political Economy, an edited special issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 12(3). He is currently at work on a new book, Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identity. Address: Dept. of Anthropology, University at Albany/SUNY, Albany, NY 12222, USA. [email: collins@albany.edu]

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