Tamil Nadu has gained international recognition for reforming its government school classrooms into active, child-centered learning environments. Our exploration of the history of the Activity Based Learning movement suggests that this reform was achieved by social movement actors serving in and through the state's administration.…

Rather than assume the relevance of "a priori" scalar distinctions (micro-, macro-, meso-), this article examines scale as an emergent dimension of sociospatial practice in educational institutions. Focusing on Buddhist debate at Tibetan monasteries in India, I describe how this educational practice has been placed as a rite of institution within…

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools that do not make adequate yearly progress must offer afterschool tutoring, entitled "Supplemental Educational Services" (SES). Drawing on 40 months of ethnographic research and utilizing actor-network theory, this article shows principals co-opting the SES provisions to do what they determine is required…

Education reform movements often promise more than they deliver. Why are such promises plausible in light of seemingly perpetual education reform? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork based in a nonprofit education reform organization, this article explores the appeal of popular notions about "using data to close the racial achievement gap." It…

As neoliberal reformers are appointed to manage the "crisis" of U.S. public schools, their power has become a pressing reality for grassroots movements in education. I examine how the Small Schools movement in Oakland, California--just as the school district fell under state administrative control--employed rites of passage to socialize a…

This article analyzes illustrative classroom events documented during an ethnographic study of bilingual classrooms in a "high-achieving" school. Through a performativity lens that emphasizes the discursive constitution of subjectivities, I demonstrate how discourses around achievement and success in the current reform context exacerbated one…

This article analyzes the process of youth political activism and development by drawing on ethnographic research on Asian and Pacific Islander youth activists. Young people revealed that collective action begins with a critical analysis of their lived experiences with inequalities. Their actions also involved oppositional consciousness that was…

This article chronicles the work of the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, an educational nonprofit organization in South Texas, by following the narrative of one of its students and two of the authors, who are also founders of Llano Grande. Through the use of ethnography, visuals, and storytelling, they present an emerging theory…

In this article, I aim to further the discussion of engaged research in anthropology and education by examining the unique changes promoted by participatory research in contrast to policy-oriented activist research models. Drawing on my work with Latina immigrant mothers in a school reform movement, I argue for a Latina feminist view of…

Critics of education in China call for increasing students' "creativity" as key to improving the nation's education. This article examines the idea of children's "creativity" in Beijing, associated with an education reform movement called "Education for Quality." On the basis of ethnographic research in three elementary schools in Beijing, I argue…

By its emphasis on arbitrary standards and misleading systems of accountability, the No Child Left Behind Act has had deleterious effects on classroom practice, teacher education, and even educational research. The new constraints on educational research, driven by a logic of randomized field tests, are part of a larger and more invidious…

This critical policy examination of the economistic discourses that control Texas's accountability reforms explores how over the last three decades Texas business elite utilized the policy process, power relationships, and educational value conflicts that promote accountability as the paradigm for education reform. Attention on "who gets what,…

Prompted by a recent review in American Anthropologist, I interviewed two people who played central roles in the training and dissemination of MACOS, a social studies curriculum unit designed for the fifth grade during the era of intensive curriculum reform beginning in the sixties. The article briefly discusses both how MACOS came to be and what…

Examines the ubiquitous discussion of academic change, the paucity of ethnographic and qualitative research on the culture of higher education, and the need for ethnographic studies of professors, administrators, trustees, and students in an era of reform. Explains that ethnographic studies are the foundation from which other qualitative…

Discusses bilingual education policy and reform in the context of indigenous languages of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, exploring the ideological paradox inherent in transforming a standardizing education into a diversifying one and in constructing a multilingual, multicultural national identity. Data come from policy documents and practitioner…