ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a struggle to shape how educational policy was mobilized through funding contracts in a large urban US school district in 2006. It suggests and demonstrates an alternative framing for the anthropology of educational policy. The chapter argues that while particular educational policies might ultimately function as mechanisms for inscribing and producing particular subjectivities, such policies are always also being mobilized on highly complex and contested landscapes that are worth studying in their own right. It also argues that examining educational policy ought to involve, at some point or at least for some anthropologists, documenting the richness of the worlds within which policy contestation plays out. The chapter further argues for the fruitfulness of following the various "dissenters" of educational policy regimes: those who, through dissent from a particular policy interpretation or implementation, work to turn policies toward practices that suit their particular visions or interests.
