Localizing No Child Left Behind Supplemental Educational Services (SES) in New York City

Abstract

Educational policy can best be conceptualized as a productive social practice. Levinson and Sutton (2001) suggest that policy is “an ongoing process of normative cultural production constituted by diverse actors across diverse social and institutional contexts” (1). As it becomes articulated, policy stimulates and channels actions through levels of governmental organizations, educational agencies, and emerging social structures. To study educational policy vertically is to capture the ways in which policy both constrains and enables localized activities and actions; adapting Tsing (2005), one could argue that policies articulate “heterogeneous and unequal encounters [that] can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (5). In this volume, inter/national educational policies are shown to empower and disempower local actors (see chapters 5, 6, 9, and 10) while simultaneously providing legitimacy to national governments and inter/national organizations (see chapters 4, 7, and 11). Studying policy vertically diminishes the gap (or what Max—see chapter 2—calls the décalage) between official and everyday actions and knowledges to reveal policy actors struggling, negotiating, and acting in ways that constrain or disable policy (see also chapters 3, 8, and 12).¹ Likewise, this chapter traces the diffused and often conflicting actions prompted by No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal educational policy of the United States, in relation to its Supplemental Educational Services (SES) provisions.