ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects the author's journey to understand the politics of knowledge embedded in the pedagogical practices that accompanied Teach For America. The political is related to the productive elements of power, what Michel Foucault calls "governmentality" and Jacque Ranciere calls the political, that is, the partition of the sensible. While educational theory and research focus on the intention of policy makers and teachers, the author focus is on how the system of reason embedded in the practices of schooling introduces intentions and purposes that are not necessarily those expressed by policy makers, school administrators, and teachers. The ethnography explores the theoretical, political, and methodological issues raised as not merely about the failure of reform in American education. The analysis directs attention to a more historical problem of the curriculum, teaching, and psychologies of learning as embodying a comparative system of reason that reinscribes the very frameworks of its existence as a strategy of change.
