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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 actor-network theory illuminates the interconnectivity of material objects, human actors, and their environments. The actor network emerges when the multiple actions of those attending to school failure flows from one location to many others. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates and directives implied that school failure would be remedied if people acted according to the policy; as seen in this study. Federal and state mandates develop and achieve salience through specific discourses and actions adopted by local entities. NCLB drove the interface between actors and their environments. The supplemental educational service, which was acclaimed by the federal and local educational authorities as a “parent-choice” program, drew mixed responses from parents. This chapter illustrates how actors came to share recognition of various forms of failure and, further, how they developed robust interventions and implemented action steps. They mutually defined the categorical distinctions of failure and continued to interpret the highly visible and consequential signs, like failing test scores and low marks on progress reports.

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.