ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly reviews the case study data from the Urbanville school district and McKinley Middle School. It suggests one final reading of the case study text and what it has to say about teachers' work culture in the basic skills era of urban school crisis management. The chapter then examines three major discourses in education that offer solutions or remedies in responding to the urban school crisis, and it indicates how teachers get treated in each of these discourses. The discourses include: a conservative, bureaucratic state discourse that continues to push new forms of rationalization and bureaucratic hierarchical control in the schools. A liberal discourse that affirms the Enlightenment or democratic ideals of excellence and equity in education but that is undermined by contradictions. And an emergent democratic-progressive discourse that shifts attention to struggles organized around class, race, and gender and to workplace democratization.
