‘We can’t let them fail for one more day’: School reform urgency and the politics of reformer-community alliances

This article provides a critical examination of neoliberal urgency in education reform. While critics of neoliberal reform policies have argued that these reforms exclude low-income community participation almost entirely, I argue that in practice this exclusion is not as total or as overt as macro-analyses would suggest. These macro analyses do not explain the complicated alliances that reformers have with some community organizations, nor do they specifically and critically examine the role that urgency plays in determining the value of community voice in school reform decisions. On the ground, elite school reformers forge tenuous alliances with select low-income community groups, while disregarding and marginalizing others. In this article, I posit that ‘urgency,’ a cherished ideal and guiding principle of the neoliberal school reform movement, becomes the mechanism for elite school reformers to distinguish ‘good’ and valuable community allies from ‘backwards’ and ignorant community voices. A critical examination of school reformer narratives in particular reveals that the discourse and practice of school reform urgency both legitimizes and hides a more profound exclusion of low-income African American voices from the school reform process.     

The Processes of Social Construction in Talk

Sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to the idea that many aspects of human life are socially constructed. However, there has been far less attention to the concrete interactional processes by which this construction occurs. In particular, scholars have neglected how consensual meaning is constructed in verbal interaction. This article outlines nine generic construction tools used in everyday talk, based on a review and synthesis of past work. These tools fall into three general categories: building blocks, linking devices, and finishing devices. The authors argue that scholars must pay greater attention to the interactional nature of social construction, and discuss three interactional processes that are central to the social construction of meaning in talk: challenge, support, and non‐response. The article presents concrete illustrations of these processes using examples from focus group discussions about gender and violence. These micro‐interactional processes often reproduce, sometimes modify, and (more rarely) resist larger institutions and structures, and thus are indispensable to understanding social life.