War or Common Cause? a Critical Ethnography of Language Education Policy, Race, and Cultural Citizenship (PB)

A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies
Series Editors Bradley A. U. Levinson, and Margaret Sutton, Indiana University
This book on bilingual education policy represents a multidimensional and longitudinal study of "policy processes" as
they play out on the ground (a single school in Los Angeles), and over time (both within the same school, and also within
the state of Georgia). In order to reconstruct this complex policy process, Anderson impressively marshals a great variety
of forms of "discourse." Most of this discourse, of course, comes from overheard discussions and spontaneous interviews
conducted at a particular school-the voices of teachers and administrators. Such discourse forms the heart of her ethnographic
findings. Yet Anderson also brings an ethnographer's eye to national and regional debates as they are conducted
and represented in different forms of media, especially newspapers and magazines. She then uses the key theoretical concept
of "articulation" to conceptually link these media representations with local school discourse. The result is an illuminating
account of how everyday debates at a particular school and media debates occurring more broadly mutually inform
one another.
Reviews: Anderson's timely, methodologically sophisticated, and compelling account surrounding the politics of bilingual
education moves beyond instrumental notions of policy to advance the idea that mandates are themselves resources that
may be vigorously contested as contending parties vie for inclusion in the schooling process. Her work artfully demonstrates how improving schooling for all children is
inseparable from a larger, much-needed discussion of what we as a polity believe about whether and how we are interconnected, together with who should and does have
a voice in the policy making and implementation process.
-Angela Valenzuela, Professor, University of Texas at Austin, author of Subtractive Schooling and Leaving Children Behind
Anderson shows the gap between clear-cut assumptions and ideologies informing education policy and legislation on language and immigration, and the complications
that arise for teachers when they actually implement language legislation in the classroom. She also illustrates assumptions about language and being American, as these
are both debated and shared by each "side" of the language and immigration debates in California and Georgia. Her chapter on California's Proposition 227 is a particular
eye-opener, demonstrating in detail the embedding of local identities and oppositions in these debates. Above all, she makes quite clear the complex, often contradictory,
web of relations among politics, language, race, and cultural citizenship.
--Bonnie Urciuoli, Professor, Hamilton College, author of Exposing Prejudice