ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case study data that suggests the restructuring of teachers' work, the curriculum and the instructional process during the basic skills era. If basic skills reform has been associated with bureaucratic-rational and businesslike forms of control over students then basic skills forms of classroom management have been associated with the de-skilling and re-skilling of teachers away from a pegagogic to managerial role. While teachers have been re-skilled as classroom managers in urban schools, their new management skills have not helped them effectively contain or defuse student resistance to an impersonal, disempowering, non-motivating curriculum. The chapter is based on data from two different urban school districts in Midstate. It begins by examining data on classroom management from Urbanville. Specifically, the chapter analyzes the official Assertive Discipline model of classroom management endorsed by the superintendent in Urbanville, which emphasized a depersonalized, bureaucratic-rational approach to teacher authority.
