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As discussed in the first chapter, the United States finds itself in the grip of a conservative restoration. Within the educational realm of society, this shift to the right has resulted in several initiatives such as efforts to privatize education through vouchers, to utilize standardized testing as the only tool for the assessment of children’s learning and subsequent graduation or grade-level promotion , to make the results of such tests public and to equate the quality of a school’s educational program and quality of teaching based upon the scores children receive on these tests, and to penalize those schools that fail to improve the test scores of their students, among other things. As discussed in chapter 1, this agenda has emerged from the economic and political realms of society and has been pushed by a variety of classes including the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, evangelical Christians, and Euro-American males. However, from the “ground floor” perspective, critiques of the conservative agenda seem terribly abstract and far removed from the challenges of educating children. To most school communities, it makes little difference what realm of society (e.g., government, business) or what class of people are pushing this conservative agenda. Public schools in the United States naturally respond to the concerns of societal forces that exist far beyond their immediate clients (i.e., children and parents). What is crucially important is how a school community responds to particular external pressures, whatever the agenda. In addition, if this conservative agenda is presented to educators as an architectonic force, then it is likely that school-reform conversations would soon degenerate into discourses of despair. What can an individual teacher or even an entire school do about the cultural shift to the right if it is presented as a grand ideological “glacier” moving across the globe? Presenting the challenges facing schools within this broad ideological context leads most educators to conclusions of powerlessness. Furthermore , even if one is successful in convincing a school community that right-wing politics and economics are the source of the misguided educational agenda being foisted upon them, their time is still best spent addressing the specific issues of educating their students, rather than on abstract, ideologies. 81 CHAPTER 5 Addressing the Conservative Agenda: Discourses of School-Based Reform *Thanks to Daniel Baron and Carol Myers for their assistance with this chapter. Nevertheless, the inclination of our society to embrace this conservative ideology and to reform schools in light of its principles is indeed troubling, and requires serious deliberation beyond the walls of academia. The challenge before us is to initiate and facilitate these conversations in ways that school communities find authentic, relevant, and meaningful. As previously mentioned , the purpose of this particular chapter is to present a portrayal of discourses we have had with school communities as issues related to this renewed conservativism have arisen in the context of school-based reform projects. This portrayal is by no means exhaustive; nor are we suggesting that our response is the most productive of all possibilities. Rather, our goal is to articulate potentiality and invite an interchange of ideas among progressive-thinking educators in the hope that we may all benefit and emerge with a more compelling response to the very powerful conservative educational agenda that has emerged in our society. ADDRESSING THE AGENDA We begin our presentation with a caveat. As previously mentioned, discourses that occur in school communities with teachers, administrators, parents, support staff, and when appropriate, students, should not be confused with doctoral seminars (Habermas, 1975). In the latter, students and the professor read, discuss texts and personal experiences, and often speculate on the causes and ramifications of particular social and educational phenomena—all organized around a central topic. In addition, these discourses often introduce or utilize particular theoretical or conceptual schools of thought as a focus of study or as a lens through which the seminar explores ideas, structures, or activities of schooling. The purpose of doctoral seminars is to encourage scholarly inquiry. The nature of schoolbased reform discourse has a different purpose, namely, the generation of potential responses to specific ideas and events related to the responsibility of educating children. Given the workload of public educators, there is little tolerance for the type of abstract interchange typical of doctoral seminars in U.S. academic institutions. The creative challenge of these conversations is to make them both substantive and practical. That is, to make them conversations that focus on “what can be done” in ways that...

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