"I used to know that": What happens when reform gets through the classroom door

Bilingual Research Journal, Winter 2000 by Dixon, Carol, Green, Judith, Yeager, Beth, Baker, Doug, Franquiz, Maria

Abstract

This article places Proposition 227 in the context of the policy web formed by a series of legislative acts and policies at the national, state, and local school board levels; federal judicial decisions; state and local elections; changes in the local school district board and superintendent. We draw on our ongoing ethnographic study of a fifth-grade classroom to illustrate what happens when policies get through the classroom door. Through this analysis, we illustrate how policies constrained the bilingual teacher's ability to make learning opportunities available to her linguistically diverse students in 1998-99.

"I used to know that." This comment by Jose, a fifth-grade student, provides a local context for the discussion of what happens in the classroom when reforms get through the classroom door. While students in almost any classroom might make this comment, this particular child was referring to what he once 'knew' in Spanish and what he believes he no longer 'knows' now that he is in a monolingual English environment in the post-Proposition 227 world. In this paper, we present a telling case (Mitchell, 1984) of the ways in which the policy context, in and outside of the classroom, shaped the opportunities for teaching, and in turn learning, for Jose's teacher and her linguistically and culturally diverse students in the fall of 1998. This case is designed to illustrate in a principled way how policies become intertextually (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) tied across time, actors, and policy contexts, creating a larger environmental press (Chrispeels, 1997). Through this analysis, we show how a series of policies at the national, state, district, and school level, not a single policy (i.e., Proposition 227), formed an intertextual web that was, and continues to be, consequential for Jose's teacher and her students.

Our goal in taking this approach is to identify ways in which policies are consequential for the lived experiences of teachers and students in classrooms, in ways anticipated or not. The complex web of policies that converged in the beginning of the 1998 school year (post-Proposition 227) established an environmental press for potential change. We use the concept of potential change for three reasons. First, Stritikus & Garcia (2000, this issue) showed that districts and individual teachers have differentially taken up the implementation of Proposition 227. Second, policy tracing research has shown that policies are often intertextually tied; that is, one builds on or is influenced by others previously put into place (Chrispeels, 1997; McDonnell & Elmore, 1987). Third, Barr and Dreeben (1983) have argued that decisions at one point in a district are products of the actions of people at one level of a school system, and along with time, become resources that people at other levels use to accomplish their work. They argue that from this perspective, the classroom is the hand that the teacher is dealt; that is, who she/he will teach, what resources will be available to the teacher, and what is viewed as possible to be done are the results of decisions of people at differing levels of a school system, not merely a decision by the teacher.

The Historical and Local Policy Contexts: Creating an Environmental Press

To understand what brought about the changes we identified, we must examine the ways in which the actions of actors in the policy contexts shaped the learning opportunities for Jose and his peers. The fact that the policy actions in Jose's district varied from those in surrounding districts suggested the need to begin our analysis by reconstructing the historical web of intertextual ties across a range of policies, rather than focusing solely on Proposition 227. The analyses presented in this section are intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive, examples of elements of the policy web in which Jose's teacher found herself in 1998. We view the nexus of these policies as constituting a telling case, one that makes visible both theoretical issues for study of policy impact and consequences for practice.

To illustrate this process and how it influenced the policy context in which Jose and his teacher found themselves, we present a series of patterns that shaped what Jose and his peers had access to. These patterns included shifts across time in policies and practices at the federal, state, and local levels. To identify the patterns of policy shift that were consequential, we drew on ethnographic research data over a 10-year period in two school districts on the central coast of California. Then, using a backward and forward mapping approach (Chrispeels, 1997; Green & Meyer, 1991; McDonnell & Elmore, 1987; Tuyay, Floriani, Yeager, Dixon, & Green, 1995), we examined policies for references to other policies or for convergence with observed impact on the local classroom settings in 1998. Through this approach, we identified five types of policy activity (Chrispeels, 1997; McDonnell & Elmore, 1987) that led to changes in bilingual education at the local classroom level. These included court cases shaping policy directions, federal and state legislation, local and state school board decisions, election results, and national reports. Each of these policies was the result of actions of groups of policy actors across potentially systems. The intertextual web of policies, then, can be viewed as the result of policy actors' interpretations of past policies and what they saw as socially significant to their particular context (cf., Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993).