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 StudiesSeries Editors Bradley A. U. Levinson, and Margaret Sutton, Indiana UniversityThis book on bilingual education policy represents a multidimensional and longitudinal study of 'policy processes' asthey play out on the ground (a single school in Los Angeles), and over time (both within the same school, and also withinthe state of Georgia). In order to reconstruct this complex policy process, Anderson impressively marshals a great varietyof forms of 'discourse.' Most of this discourse, of course, comes from overheard discussions and spontaneous interviewsconducted at a particular school-the voices of teachers and administrators. Such discourse forms the heart of her ethnographicfindings. Yet Anderson also brings an ethnographer’s eye to national and regional debates as they are conductedand represented in different forms of media, especially newspapers and magazines. She then uses the key theoretical conceptof 'articulation' to conceptually link these media representations with local school discourse. The result is an illuminatingaccount of how everyday debates at a particular school and media debates occurring more broadly mutually informone another.Reviews: Anderson’s timely, methodologically sophisticated, and compelling account surrounding the politics of bilingualeducation moves beyond instrumental notions of policy to advance the idea that mandates are themselves resources thatmay be vigorously contested as contending parties vie for inclusion in the schooling process. Her work artfully demonstrates how improving schooling for all children isinseparable 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 havea voice in the policy making and implementation process.-Angela Valenzuela, Professor, University of Texas at Austin, author of Subtractive Schooling and Leaving Children BehindAnderson shows the gap between clear-cut assumptions and ideologies informing education policy and legislation on language and immigration, and the complicationsthat arise for teachers when they actually implement language legislation in the classroom. She also illustrates assumptions about language and being American, as theseare 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 particulareye-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