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Implementing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) continues to be challenging at the district level because people do not automatically do what they are told. This chapter documents the appropriation of NCLB by tracing the linkages between the New York City school district, public schools across five boroughs, city government, and United Education. Integrating the federal and state actions with the more localized interactions, it traces “policy connections between different organizational and everyday worlds, even where actors in different sites do not know each other or share a moral universe.” The chapter provides an investigation into how NCLB creates circumstances that limit the range of possible reactions and outcomes to school failure—and also how NCLB enables the creative and practical management of problems constituted by the uncertainties of the policy. It challenges conventional educational ethnography and educational policy analysis in three important ways, firstly by reducing the gap between everyday actions and activities and government action. Secondly, the chapter concurrently regards the actions of disparate policy stakeholders, including supplemental educational services managers and politicians who foray temporarily into policy processes, and principals whose policy roles persist, often over years. Finally, it expands the field of study to transactional spaces that transcend physical locations.

While concerns about addressing school failure were ubiquitous throughout the New York City's public schools, the administrative staff—principals, assistant principals, parent coordinators, and deans—of certain schools expressed great alarm and called for more immediate action. In schools where failure was made to matter excessively, through exaggerated actions and discourses of despair, the activities of supplemental educational services were translated as necessary “lifelines.” This chapter illustrates the urgency and the problems that resulted when schools and tutoring companies partnered to fix school failure as quickly as possible. It focuses on interactions between MS 532's principal, assistant principal, and parent coordinator, each of whom expected United Education to be the school's “lifeline,” and the education manager, who was given the ominous task of “saving the school” in sixty program hours. The tensions, complexities, and contradictions in the appropriation of No Child Left Behind at MS 532 demonstrate how language is repeatedly used as a norming agent. Attending to failure with (hyper)urgency led to the construction of yet more failure.

Culturing school failure requires an exaggeration or a misinterpretation, intentional or otherwise, of the signs of failure. As federal and state educational policies, and the policy-directed actions of school districts, schools, and supplemental educational service providers interact, failure is produced rather than found and confronted. This chapter presents three examples of inventing failure; the cases involve the actions of many in schools, the Department of Education, and United Education. Success, a possibility to which all strive, became at PS 100 overshadowed by its counterpart, failure. Even when all the recognized signs of success were apparent, the misreading of them erroneously rendered their measured success illegitimate.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the impact of school failure on the identity formation of youths who find themselves at the bottom of a vastly differentiated educational hierarchy. “These kids,” as they are referred to here, are variously labeled with terms like troubled, at-risk, and low achieving. The chapter also discusses the paradox of getting ahead as well as the book's theoretical foundations and arguments and methodology. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) persists in the social construction (and social judgments) of “disadvantaged” children, the policy's target population, and furthers a particular presentation of the popular and enduring “faith in using schools as a lever of social progress” for those categorized as most needy—i.e., poor minority children. NCLB represents the surface expression of deep histopolitical, sociocultural, and ideological discourses in American education that cast poor minority students as failing (and therefore deviant) and in need of government intervention. It is built upon a reform foundation that increasingly includes corporations' interests and market-based solutions premised on the assumption that America's public school system needs outside intervention. NCLB's requirement that teachers demonstrate subject matter competence on a test in each subject matter has rendered many highly accomplished teachers “unqualified.” The ongoing multiplicity of educational reforms in New York serve as a reminder of the continual flow of actions, the movement of actors, the temporary associations, and the localization in policy appropriation. Thus, focusing only on face-to-face interactions cannot adequately capture the appropriation of NCLB and the ways in which it affects school failure.

This chapter discusses the enabling features of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy by examining the supplemental educational service (SES) providers, the temporary associations they make with schools, the actions these linkages seem to facilitate, and their connections to school failure. It presents ways in which SES is not exactly regulated, not exactly proven, and not exactly funded to show how some actions—which appear not exactly aimed at reducing school failure—are more common than expected. Afterschool programs represent a rich and diverse network of providers that state education agencies can tap as they seek to provide parents with maximum choice among providers. Afterschool programs have a long history of providing tutoring and enrichment programs in the schools and communities targeted by supplemental services. NCLB requires failing schools to partner with SES providers to improve students' academic achievement. These schools, in need of improvement according to NCLB, are deemed incapable of improving through their own efforts.

The juxtaposition of the stated goal to fix failure and the daily actions in which failure was admittedly ignored illuminates the ways in which failure was made to matter through inactions. This chapter demonstrates that failure can be constructed through everyday actions. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), like all policy, has gaps of ambiguity—spaces in which actors can take “charge” and establish, for themselves and often others, elements of the policy that may or may not be in line with the initial stated aims of NCLB. Policy is made in many contexts by diverse actors, and supplemental educational services (SES) mandates link an increasing variety of public and private policy mediators, each of whom makes claim to policy authority. NCLB steers action toward school failure in a generic manner—i.e., local educational agencies, schools, and SES providers must do something about it—but what exactly they do is somewhat flexible.

This chapter discusses the changes in school discipline that have taken place recently, as well as competing explanations for these trends, focusing on recorded levels of school crime across the United States, public fear of school crime, and perceptions of general failures in public education. Given that fears of crime have risen and punitive policies have grown without corresponding increases in actual crime, the most satisfying explanations for the new school discipline regime focus on postmodern insecurities and anxieties over crime, poverty, and school failure. The chapter presents prior evidence on the effects of this new discipline regime, and discusses sociological and philosophical work on the functions of mass education, which clarifies the ways that schools socialize students to learn their roles in society and raises questions about what life lessons students might take away from contemporary school discipline and security.