ABSTRACT
In 1994, three years aft er publication of Kozol’s (1991) Savage Inequalities brought national attention to the distressed pedagogical, fi scal, and capital infrastructures of the almost exclusively African American populated East St. Louis Illinois School District 189, the State of Illinois appointed a three-member panel to oversee the fi scal operations of the district. Th e focus of
our study was primarily an analysis of the public discourse between the locally elected school board and the state appointed fi nancial oversight panel, and secondarily a preliminary assessment of the infl uence of the oversight process on fi scal and student achievement indicators in the district (Roseboro et al., 2006). Data representative of this public discourse involved archival documentation, which included 175 newspaper articles about the district printed between 1994 and 2004, legal decisions, oversight panel reports, state fi scal reports, school board minutes, and student achievement data. Th e centrality of this archival data in our methodology is refl ective of our interest in interrogating the public construction, performance, and representation of highly political discourses and collective identities involving these two bodies and their relationship to education in East St. Louis, as opposed to more immanent inquiry into the actors’ perception of the complexities and dynamics of the oversight process. As a consequence, media representations are prioritized in our interpretive work with the recognition that, within the contemporary hyper-reality generated through media matrices compressing time and space, these representations act as totalizing narratives that mediate the world and so structure, explain, and delineate knowledge prior to experience or refl ection (O’Malley, 2009a). Implications of the functions of this media role vis-à-vis public pedagogy are addressed below.
