Jill Koyama

Principals as Bricoleurs Making Sense and Making Do in an Era of Accountability

Purpose: The study investigates the ways in which principals engage with, and attend to, the data-driven accountability measures of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and local mandates. Theoretical framework: The study is framed with the notion of assemblage, a term often associated with actor-network theory (ANT)—a theory that focuses analytic attention on how disparate actors, material, and discursive practices come together to form dynamic associations. Within the assemblage, principals are situated as bricoleurs. Research methods and data: Data for analysis come from interviews conducted with 45 New York City principals between June 2005 and October 2008 as part of a larger ethnographic study examining NCLB, and a series of interviews with 12 of the 45 principals, conducted annually through March 2012. District surveys, various documents, and field notes of participant observation also inform the study. Findings: Principals play active policy roles in negotiating federal regulations and local initiatives, as well as selectively performing assessment and accountability mandates. Principals, who have often been cast in the media as either dupes of the state or as active resistors, negotiate and appropriate external accountability in innovative, sometimes savvy, ways. Implications for practice and research: Principals need to consider institutional circumstances and external accountability not as boundaries or constraints, but rather as available material with which to respond. Future research should aim to examine the ways in which principals engage with data and accountability demands via reflexive interactions with different types of knowledge, mediating artifacts, and methods.

Generating, comparing, manipulating, categorizing: reporting, and sometimes fabricating data to comply with No Child Left Behind mandates

This article ethnographically examines the ways in which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) links local practices to the centralized processing of data through its narrowing of procedures and measurements aimed at accountability. Framed by actor-network theory, it draws upon data consistently collected between June 2005 and October 2008, and then intermittently through October 2010, to consider the ways in which policy technologies, such as standardized testing, bring together New York City (NYC) public schools, district administrators, for-profit educational support businesses, and government officials to address the accountability requirements of NCLB. This article reveals how, through a range of sophisticated mechanisms that support the generation and comparison of data, NYC schools become reduced to data calculation and management centers. NCLB’s standardization, privatization, and marketization encourage local policy actors to become complicit in standardizing and quantifying academic assessment through their reliance on services and products marketed to schools and districts that are not meeting academic benchmarks. These services, mostly offered by for-profit vendors, help keep schools in compliance with policy requirements, but replace a focus on student learning with the production, management, and sometimes the fabrication, of data.

Assembling and Dissembling Policy as Productive Play

In this piece, the authors examine educational policy by focusing on the ways in which actors “play” or selectively follow, negotiate, and appropriate cultural instructions and rules. They outline a framework that situates assemblage, a notion utilized in actor-network theory, within the critical cultural study of policy. Treating policy assemblage as a dynamic cultural form, they argue, provides a way of revealing the complexities of sociomaterial connections inherent to policy implementation. The authors pay particular attention to what happens when disparate actors join together to perform policy-directed tasks. It is within these heterogeneous and hybrid linkages that policy negotiations and controversies can become productive play. The authors briefly discuss the dynamic composition of productive policy play. Then, applying it to a controversy revealed in the ethnographic analysis of No Child Left Behind conducted by the first author, they demonstrate the framework’s usefulness in considering the sociocultural processes of policy in action.

Bilingual education policy as political spectacle: educating Latino immigrant youth in New York City

Abstract To examine the ways in which high schools in New York City attend to second language acquisition is to consider everyday actions in schools, government dealings, localized policy responses, and disparate discourses on bilingualism. It is to position the circumstances of learning and teaching English in an American high school within the problems encountered and produced when multiple educational policies collide in local settings, such as individual schools. It is also to consider, and then interrogate, the ‘political spectacle’ in which educational actors associated with schools – teachers, counselors, parents, students, community members, activists, and administrators – become dramaturgically cast into political-policy roles as they enact federal, state, and district policies with regard not only to issues of language acquisition and bilingualism but also to increased accountability, mandated high-stakes testing, and other sanctions-driven approaches. Drawing on qualitative research conducted between September 2003 and May 2008, this article situates Gregorio Luperón High School, a successful bilingual school for Latino newcomers, within a web of politics and policies, grounded in the history of bilingual education in New York City. It reveals how this school, caught within a political-policy matrix of centralized federal authority under No Child Left Behind and decentralized accountability under the Citys Children First reforms, continues to emphasize second language acquisition as the ongoing work of building a bilingual speech community, even in the face of educational policies that increasingly narrow assessment of language acquisition and intensify the overall evaluation of academic achievement.

Emergent Bilinguals: Framing Students as Statistical Data?.

Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools—whom we refer to as “emergent bilinguals”—are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators, politicians, and the media through the manipulation and publication of school test scores, district data, and state reports. Drawing upon two overlapping, complementary qualitative studies conducted in New York City, we reveal the ways in which this places burdens on emergent bilinguals and their schools and narrows important discussions of bilingual education pedagogies to ones centered on numerical data.

Making Failure Matter Enacting No Child Left Behind’s Standards, Accountabilities, and Classifications

This article ethnographically examines the paradoxical situation in which one high-achieving New York City public school is “constructed” as failing when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) assessments are miscalculated. Drawing upon actor-network theory (ANT)—a perspective that aims to explain how people, their ideas, and the material objects they produce assemble together in dynamic collective activity to attend to a particular issues—this work reveals how those in the school join with a for-profit educational support business, district administrations, and city officials to construct, encounter, and confront the situations created by the miscalculations. What unfolds over the three years after the school is incorrectly labeled as failing is shown to bean example of what is possible, if not probably when accountability-laden, sanctions-drive, and calculation-focused policies, such as NCLB, gain favor. By exploring the gaps between policy texts, policy aims, and their effects, this ANT analysis offers educational practitioners and researchers a way to interrogate and understand the endurance of policies, like NLCB, which show questionable efficacy over time.

When Things Come Undone: The Promise of Dissembling Education Policy.

This article focuses on the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the USAs broad sweeping federal education policy, in a persistently low-achieving school in which the majority of students are refugees and immigrants. Drawing on a 26-month ethnography, I reveal the ways in which a NCLB-guided school turnaround plan is enacted variably, especially for refugees. I utilize assemblage, a term often associated with actor network perspectives, to study how people, their material objects, and their discursive practices are brought together to implement the plan. Assemblage analysis reveals the struggles and contestations between various entities as they aim to establish the authority and legitimacy of ideas and practices of schooling refugees – most of whom speak languages other than English and have had several prolonged interruptions in their formal education. I trace how certain ideas come to cohere as a more-or-less durable curriculum assemblage, and how they are mobilized, defended, and challenged. The findings reveal that even under the constraints of assessments and sanctions, the assemblage is disrupted and comes apart as new actors, including refugee parents and community leaders, bring unexpected elements into play, introducing emotion, challenging expertise, questioning motives, and resisting the practices produced by the authorized policy actors.

Resettling Notions of Social Mobility: Locating Refugees as "Educable" and "Employable".

The global movement of people alters our understandings of social mobility. Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected since January 2011 and utilize the notion of assemblage to document and analyze how disparate people, their material objects, and discursive practices are brought together to render refugees as educable, productive, and employable in the United States. I examine the adaptations that result when livelihood paths and educational opportunities become paradoxically diverse due to transnational migrations and are constrained by localized politico-economic environments. My findings complicate the assumption that formal education represents an enduring pathway or necessary precursor to upward social mobility. As refugees are required by resettling agents to become economically self-sufficient as soon as possible, formal education such as English-as-a-second-language courses can limit initial employment opportunities and narrowing families’ livelihood strategies upon resettlement, especially during the recent economic downturn.

Learning English, working hard, and challenging risk discourses

Refugees in the US are often seen as risk-takers—those who engage in potentially harmful behaviors that simultaneously provide opportunity; with their perceived weaknesses in English language training, overall education, and US cultural capital, refugees are also frequently situated as being “at-risk” of not adapting to their new contexts. In this article, which draws on a two year ethnographic study in a Northeastern city, I trouble the simultaneous positioning of refugees as risk-takers and as being at risk. National policies governing the integration of refugees reduce social and educational adaptation to economic self-sufficiency, resulting in the emergence of three threads of risk: the risk of refugees being dependent on government resources, the risk of refugees “taking” jobs from Americans, and the risk of refugees threatening national security. Here, I focus on the first two threads, which represent a dichotomy of risk narratives, but which also poise refugees as risks to the mythical/idealized quality of American life and economic well-being. I document refugees participating in ESL and career-readiness classes offered by local resettlement agencies to reveal how educators in both ESL and career classes employ the narrative of positive risk-taking to challenge the more negative risk discourses.

Schools as Refuge? The Politics and Policy of Educating Refugees in Arizona

Despite the central role schools have played in the resettlement of refugees, we know little about how principals, teachers, parents, and staff at community-based organizations interpret and negotiate national immigration policy and state education policies. Combing critical discourse analysis (CDA) and actor-network theory (ANT), we capture how these actors work together and against each other to enact supports with regard to these newcomer students. Data includes a 36-month ethnography of refugee networks in Arizona. We argue that policies around English language acquisition and academic support further isolate refugee students and diminish their formal learning experiences in the United States.