ABSTRACT
The state reforms did not start out as a bombing raid, but they did pro-
ceed completely independently of anything going on in schools. They were
driven from the top, defined as management problems waiting for an expert
manager to solve. They were formulated on the assumption that schools are at
the bottom of the bureaucracy. If schools are to be improved, then the bureau-
cratic machinery needs to be running more smoothly. And bureaucratic
machinery runs best when strict management controls are in place. If this
sounds like a deliberate plan to create schools full of defensive teachers and
bored, disengaged students, who merely go through the motions of schooling
in order to produce credits and credentials, that in fact became one of the dan-
gers good teachers had to try to overcome once the reform controls were all in
place. The distrust and cycle of lowered expectations found in the schools por-
trayed in Contradictions of Control were in fact inadvertently implemented by
official policy when Texas tried to “reform” its schools. They provide a power-
ful lesson for a nation increasingly preoccupied with calls for “standards” and
for narrow measurement indicators as keys to holding its public schools
“accountable” to those who would control them. They provide a powerful
warning about effects on teaching and learning when all the authority over all
the significant decisions about teaching and learning is centralized and all the
means are standardized.
