ABSTRACT
Traditionally, schools of education have been seen in largely functional ways, as sites for training teachers. Our relationship to the more formal disciplines has been largely subordinate and functional. We have been seen as “handmaidens” to disciplines such as English, Math, and History. Our role, popularly conceived, has been to train teachers to effectively implement other people’s curricula, typically de-contextualized sets of skills. This position of “gracious submission” has made us particularly vulnerable to recent politically motivated attacks (Pinar, 2004). Key here are the new accountability and testing logics which have largely dominated popular discussion around education. The most notable of these US movements, of course, has been the No Child Left Behind legislation. The effects of this legislation have been broad and deep-including the attenuation of the curricula, both in terms of substance and pedagogical practice-though they have been particularly profound on the most vulnerable of public schools. At the most basic level, a corporate language has overtaken school discourse, a language that implies clear inputs and outputs, assessments and measurements that can be correlated and compared across disparate sites. Knowledge itself has come to be treated like a perfectly transparent commodity, one that can be treated and dispensed independent of particular actors in context.
