Reform and Making Human Kinds: The Double Gestures of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Practice of Schooling

Abstract

The chapter considers the globalization and transnational through examining reform as embodying standards. My use of standards is not in the publically stated goals of policy. They are in the principles generated in the making of the objects of reflection and administration of children. These standards relate historically to the rules and standards about who the child is and should be and who is “different,” abjected, and thus excluded. The chapter begins with interviews of American urban teachers, with urban as a phrase used to talk about teachers of children of the poor, racialized, and ethnic groups that are marginalized in educational settings. This child is called “the child left behind” in American legislation designed to improve schools for a category in education that refers to children considered socially disadvantaged, marginalized, and associated with problems of low achievement in school. The chapter proceeds to historicize how differences and divisions are established to make “the urban” teacher and child as different in American social and education sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that the sciences of teaching and learning embody cultural theses about kinds of people. These cultural theses involve double gestures: the hope of schooling in making kinds of people whose modes of living embody collective moral values and with this hope of inclusion are simultaneous fears of the dangers and dangerous populations. The thinking about reform is a historical method to study what schools do, how reforms function, and educational research. My concern with the double gestures of reform is to explore the limits of contemporary frameworks that define the subject of school reform and its research programs.