In contextualizing what happens in the schools I placed under study, I meant to ask an encompassing question about such schools amidst their operation: "What are such schools for?" Why does the situation in California (or America, or the world for that matter) support large, publicly-funded institutions sheltering children for a large (6 1/2 hours is standard for California schools) portion of 180 days of each school year? In the following pages I will look at this process of schooling in order to understand comprehension of its outcome, to consider what it is in view of its immersion of the world of late-capitalism.

I will identify two important discourses that have arisen to respond to these questions of school purpose. One discourse arises in response to the matter of "classroom management," reflecting a concern about what sort of social process is supposed to occur within the environment of instruction, usually (in the California districts I observed) within a classroom. Another discourse reflects orientation toward the product of schooling, and can be discursively organized in terms of a political debate over how the State and the various School Districts in the state of California are to administer schooling. This political debate can extend to the matter of how schooling is to be administered, in terms (for instance) of what sort of classroom management strategies are to be used in a particular classroom, or what language instruction is to be given in, or what test is to be mastered after the instructional period is over. It can also be a wider-ranging debate about how one is to judge the schooling system as a whole from the "qualities" of the students, as regarded from a wide variety of perspectives: personal qualities, professional qualities, capabilities, propensities to violence, etc.

What makes the above two discourses important, it should be stated, is their combination in influencing the realities of the practices of adult authority-figures, as they play their roles within school. These practices can be described as practices of "classroom management," and they can be described in terms of what they prepare, in terms of what product comes out of the schools. I will need to be careful in showing how discourses of school's product tied to discourses of classroom management, and vice-versa. But, in the next paragraphs, I will focus on discourses of production, for the sake of understanding how schools can be conceived as loci of production.

As far as the product-orientation of schools is concerned, I would like to address the wider debate mentioned above, the debate about what greater personal qualities are produced by school, for I would like to reveal managerial discourse about schools as revolving around implicit, disciplinary, assumptions about what schooling is for, assumptions which can be understood from an analysis of the discourse of "classroom discipline" (or, more generally, "classroom management"). What such discourse reveals is a disciplinary hidden curriculum, a curriculum which I will reveal as taking an implicit stand within the political debates about "what education is for." And within this political debate about education that encompasses practices within the schools, I will outline the "side" of the debate most responsible for widening this debate, the side taken by critical scholars of the educational process.

In this dissertation, I argue that managerial discourses about schooling conform to an implicit notion of schooling-as-production that constrains the public debate about schooling as if school were a typical field of industrialized endeavor. The question that such discourses prompt is one of how does one understand schooling as a whole, given that "what schooling produces" is multivalent. We can understand how this question is prompted if we pose implicit answers to the question of what schooling is for. School produces intelligent children, or it produces high test scores, or it produces so many hours/ so many days of school spent by so many children (and this is the measure of the State of California's requirement for the length of a school year), or it produces children with certain definable skills in literacy and numeracy. Which "product" one sees coming out of school depends upon how one is inclined to measure the schooling process as it is.

The conclusion one can draw from this reductionistic line of reasoning is that school conceived thusly is a culture industry, a vehicle for producing children as cultural artifacts in a more-or-less assembly line. School promotes industrially-produced artefacts of culture (toys, books, textbooks, writing implements and surfaces, music, video products, athletic equipment, the school grounds themselves) in a totalizing manner upon a captive audience whose labor is "made efficient" according the principles of scientific management popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor and employed on the assembly line by Henry Ford. But, of course there are many distinct ways in which one could judge a school as itself being a culture industry, according to its product. Even so, there is a kernel of truth to the notion of schooling as an assembly line where students are produced.

In analyzing schools, I might start from the twin assumptions of managerial discourse and assembly line production, and if I were searching for the practical link between these assumptions, I would wind up with a picture of what happens in schools as guided by the techniques of "classroom management." A book that vividly illustrates this "path not (merely) taken" in my observation of schooling is Michel Foucault'sDiscipline and Punish, which offers a history of disciplinary institutions, and in doing so compares schools to prisons, factories, barrackses, hospitals, and other modern institutions. In thus grouping together of institutions, Foucault lays bare the traditional purpose of behavioral manipulation in schools; schools, like the other above institutions, are to produce "docile bodies." In this process of production, power is to be exerted upon bodies in order to produce "aptitude" through "discipline," both particularly scholastic-sounding terms, but terms also suited to discourse about the other disciplinary institutions. Here is Foucault's analysis of how it was described:

...discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, 'docile' bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an 'aptitude', a 'capacity' which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination. (Foucault p. 138)

One needs a broader framework than that offered by Discipline and Punish, however, in order to get from the dynamics of management which Foucault's spells out, to answering questions as to the purpose of the human systems described so well in disciplinary terms. The question about "what school is for" that is left unanswered by applying Foucault is the matter of who dominates through the investment of aptitudes, and how, i.e. what is the further purpose of "aptitude."

The other question that would be left unanswered in a simple application of Foucault's ideas of disciplinarity to the schools, is the question of what sort of theoretical framework will situate communication within schools (as seen within the performances of each school day) amidst the overall social and poltical purposes attributed (by the society) to schooling. Adult society has made education into a "political issue," an issue that has received an intense public focus in my ethnographic situation, amidst political battles over standardized testing and the ballot victory of Proposition 227, a proposed law passed by California's voters which would essentially eliminate bilingual education throughout the state. This, as I will show in the following paragraphs, has reignited the debate over "what education is for" -- it might also change the actual routine in the schools themselves as well as stimulating a debate about how schools are to be studied. I will get to the theoretical problem of situating the performance of the school day amidst the attributed purposes of schooling later; for now, I want to concentrate on the necessity of including the debate about "what school is for" into the Foucauldian approach to understanding "classroom discipline" within disciplinary schooling.

Although Foucault describes the productive process of discipline (described above) as a "political anatomy," and says that "discipline is the political anatomy of detail," he is long on describing the matters of disciplinary detail and short on what the actual politics of institutional discipline might happen to be. Of course, such politics is not Foucault's topic in Discipline and Punish, but one has to read the Foucault opus through The History of Sexuality, Parts 2 and 3, to find Foucault speculating about the possibility that one can use disciplinary practices to dominate oneself; thus also disciplinary practices in the schools can be used for student self-domination, thus student empowerment. The detail that is short within Foucault's specification of "the composition of forces," where he argues that discipline is an art of "composing forces in order to obtain an effective machine," is the detail of what difference would it make if the forces imposed upon the schooled bodies were to be composed in one way, or another, efficiently, or inefficiently. Are "disciplined" bodies capable of forming a public sphere, rebelling against schooling, performing well in school assignments and tests, choosing tasks, working efficiently in groups, playing efficiently in groups etc. In short, do different constellations of power in these "effective machines" benefit different groups of people differently?

The only way this detail can be addressed is if one provides a theoretical context the question of what school is for. This is the question any managerial approach to schooling will have claimed to answer beforehand (for one cannot produce without an idea of what one is producing). Jo Sprague's pathbreaking essay on instructional communication, "Expanding the Research Agenda for Instructional Communication: Raising Some Unasked Questions" (Communication Education 41 (1992) 1-25) starts by criticizing the "managerial" paradigm in research on organizational communication (5), and continues by explaining the perspectives of radical pedagogy from a communication research perspective, culminating in a "critical research agenda for instructional communication" that states the important questions for critical researchers in this subfield.

Often the "politics of schooling" is adopted as a political assessment of the content of the curriculum, of the matter of "how should schools teach reading?" (and apparently in this stead the State of Texas has mandated phonics in its public schools as a teaching-reading technique) or "to what extent should public schools be allowed to require students to repeat grades they do not pass?" These are important political questions about school, but it should also be remembered that there's much more happening in a public school than that that which enters into adult political discussions about "the schools." Thus the central questions asked by critical scholarship involve the necessity of researching children within the schooling process in order to discover what makes schooling "political."

This critical approach might counterpose itself to a managerial approach to schooling, which would take the objectives that are imposed bureaucratically upon schools as natural. Schooling according to this approach becomes a system, where the school system is made to conform to the role the administrators try to impose upon it. Such systems are imposed upon schools with the advertised claim of "improving" schools by imposing standards for compliance to the wishes of school managers, but rarely is it asked about the managerial approach to schooling as to whether the standards it sets satisfy the full range of our understandings of "what school is for." Is the point of schooling, today an institution required commonly among the world's children, the imposition of management strategies upon children in order to "get" these children to achieve standards? Is that the whole point of schooling? The critical approach to the problem of "what schooling is for" might ask as to whether there are other end-goals to the schooling process as it exists, especially whether there are social ideals (such as freedom, democracy, justice, social harmony) that are in any way promoted by schooling.

Live, ethnographic critical research in school communication will try to politicize schools in a way that will bring to life the ideals of radical pedagogy, so as to introduce new possibilites for changing educational systems, and so its narratives have as their ultimate "ends" the creation of narratives of political change. Thus such research would use itself as a tool for changing the situation of schools. This is clear from a quick review of the literature, when we look at some of the paradigmatic authors whose names arise in critical communication studies treatments of radical education. In the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci tried to combat class-based educational culture in his native Italy by structuring his narrative of radical education around the identification and cultivation of "organic intellectuals" (Gramsci 25) -- Paulo Freire's primary narrative of liberatory education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, progresses narratively toward the unfolding of "conscientizao," ostensibly the bringing of a people to a transaction of liberatory social change, to be brought about through a process of "problem-posing education," and this narrative progression informs Freire's other books as well. Such research starts by identifying a kernel of possibility within the status quo that is substantial enough to allow the researcher to narrate the struggle for a better world, a world where education is directed toward the unfolding of students as agents for change, where it is assumed that education is "for" a process of social transformation.

Critical research in school communication will not be baptized into existence with one essay on how such theory works, however; the narrative expression of the desire for politics will lose its potential if it stays within the safe confines of the latent politics of (academic) theory.

A whole host of problems remains for the critical researcher within the academy who wishes to disrupt the static understanding of school provided by managerial (i.e. academically-reproductive) research on the school setting, aiming instead to create a narrative that has political change as its ultimate end. First among these problems must be the many taken-for-granted assumptions that influence teacher and student activity in classroom settings. Regardless of what actually happens within the school setting, there is an observable demand for school to be what its managers (superintendents, school board members, principals, teachers, parents, and sometimes even students) say it should be. The result of it all can be school where the various parties come with their expectations, and the unexpected will happen. Thus the performance of the rituals of schooling is not entirely a reflection of managerial practice.

Discussion in the later chapters of this dissertation, of the rituals of substitute teaching, will reveal that deviation from managerial practice is especially common in classrooms where a substitute is placed in charge. However, as will also be shown later, substitute teaching will in itself not produce an outcome favorable to critical pedagogy, a practice (to be analyzed in depth later) that attempts to "go out and get" the goals the critical researcher would only advocate from within a study of schooling-as-it is.

The critical text cannot redirect the narrative of schooling toward the end of political change, however, merely by educating us (as academic readers) about what to think about education. Patti Lather's statement in her book Getting Smart that "a text that might help enable movement beyond received habits of thought and practice is a form of political intervention, even given the (largely unknowable) limits of discursive challenge" (Lather p. 154) is on the side of the political optimists; a contrary opinion would argue that texts might not help enable movement, and political intervention might have to do more with knowing what constitutes a performed discursive challenge to the status quo (in the situation at hand) than with any power presumed to be in a text, itself. The problem, from this opposing perspective, is not Lather's opinion, but rather in the performatively-static social construction of the academic reader, in the failure of society to construct the academic as an activist. Studying ideology, critiquing it and transgressing it, is important toward the goals of critical social science that Jo Sprague put forth, but it is a half-measure: what the critical student of the school needs is a performed political, something to embody politics, rather than merely a symbolic political, a stock-in-trade for the academic. The important thing in this regard is that the performance of the critical text about education be something that contributes to the ongoing political reality.

Michelle Fine's critical ethnography of schools Framing Dropouts is one text that reveals how the performance of a challenge to the status quo can become more important than the mere use of the vocabularies of emancipation. Fine's book, furthermore, is a prime example of how the critical ethnography of educational institutions will not come to a political conclusion about such institutions if it restricts itself to a political analysis of the communication prevalent in the classroom, but must also do a political analysis of the rituals performed in such schools. As such, Framing Dropouts will be the starting point for a theorizing practice that will situate communication within schools amidst the overall social purpose, the political dynamic of the school system itself. First, however, I will analyze the political and communicative dynamic of the subject school of Fine's study, then I will discuss larger theoretical implications.

Fine's book is the product of a study of a comprehensive high school in New York City with a high dropout rate. In her study, she tries to understand to what extent the graduates and dropouts she studies have the capacity to critique their social circumstances, whether they blame their circumstances upon themselves or whether they also understand them as products of a system. What she finds is that "many high school dropouts developed budding, confused, and critical social consciousness," but that "in contrast, many of the graduates... displayed far less initially in the way of critical consciousness" and that "they typically produced belief systems that portrayed the world as fair and even handed." (Fine, p. 126) What makes this conclusion especially interesting is her evisceration of the opinions of a student she calls "Donald" : "Donald, who often read Malcolm X during class, presented a view of education as uncritically associated with social and economic mobility." (p. 129) So in the environment of Fine's school, it isn't the texts read in the classroom that connect the students to "critical consciousness," so much as it is the circumstances of dropping out or staying in this particular school which allow the students to produce texts that evoke this critical consciousness. Fine has the students produce essays so that she can assess this critical consciousness.

So what makes the school Fine studies such, that its graduates do not evoke a critical consciousness? She explains:

Urban, public, comprehensive high schools serving low-income students are... often organized in ways that...nurture participation, democracy, and critique largely in students who demonstrate that they are unlikely to rebel or act on anything that is unsafe to name (p. 199)

Fine's ethnography reveals that the most prominent symbolic divide in the environment of New York City dropouts and high school graduates has less to do with the symbols themselves than it does with the status of the students. She says of the student body as a whole that:

Quite counterintuititve portraits of dropouts and stayins emerged. Students who dropped out were significantly less depressed, more likely to say "If a teacher gave me a B and I deserved an A I would do something about it," and less likely to provide highly conforming responses to the social desirability questionnaire. In contrast, students who remained in school were significantly more depressed, more likely to say "If a teacher gave me a B, I would do nothing about it; teachers are always right." They also presented themselves as extremely conformist." (Fine p. 4)

We also get a portrait of school policy that would seek to portray images of student success while hiding its creation of student failure behind a large dropout rate. "I remember the first PTA meeting, when the principal announced, 'I'm proud to say that 80 percent of our graduates go on to college.' I wondered -- and later learned what he didn't say, that only 20 percent of incoming ninth graders would ever graduate (p. 2)." In her discussion of the public sphere informing the school she studies, Fine furthermore shows that the public and the participants in schooling has a highly diverse notion of what schooling is for, but she also details a list of excuses (she calls them "ideological fetishes" and "material fetishes" on pp. 179-204) that her informants offer, for the sake of not resisting the status quo of schooling, a status quo filled with state mandates and with failure for those who do not meet such mandates. So the pattern of the public sphere and the pattern of communication in the classroom present the same performative pattern, according to Fine -- a diversity of voiced opinion tends to reinforce a status quo because of assymetries of power and the absence of public or student resistance.

So, not surprisingly, Fine, a psychologist, chooses "silencing" as the discursive form that most prominently symbolized the exclusions that were taking place in the school, at the administrative level of the school, and in the public sphere about schooling. This appears in Framing Dropouts as an expansion of discourse about schooling, much as Foucault's History of Sexuality Part 1 notes the silencing of sexual discourse in the Victorian Era in England as an expansion of discourse. The opposite of "silencing," for Fine, is "nurturing student voices," a communicative activity that apparently happens at the school she studies, but does not predominate. Silencing provides Fine with a "metaphor" (p. 61) for the structural organization of the school, but Fine notes that "the practices of administration, the relationships between school and community, and the forms of pedagogy and curriculum applied were all scarred by the fear of naming, provoking the move to silence," but it is never made clear what the relationship is between the various silences in administrative, community, and school communication.

Instead, Fine concentrates on her observations of silencing in classroom communication to arrive at a determination that "if silencing prevailed throughout CHS (the school), some moments in each school day were nevertheless created by teachers who invited fragments of student lives into the realm of 'what counts,' and used these fragments vividly as the stuff of education." (p. 53) The researcher then goes on to depict a multitude of learning experiences in which student voices are nurtured. So it isn't clear that silencing is uniformly a part of the scholastic experience at CHS, but that nevertheless it is the main trope symbolizing the difference between those who stay and those who drop out. It's also unclear whether and to what extent silencing in the classroom has any effect upon the students' tenure at CHS. After reading the chapter on silencing, I wanted to ask its author what effect the classroom ritual had (if any at all) in determining what sort of outlook students had upon life, since the rituals of dropping out and of staying in school appeared to be the determining rites.

To theorize "dropping out" within Michelle Fine's ethnographic discoveries of classroom communication, to connect the politics she describes with the performance she observes, one will need a theory of "politics, ritual, and symbol" rather than a theory of mere "symbol" that would look at silencing and nurturing student voices as communicative activities to be interpreted as signs that oversaw a disciplinary order, wherein student bodies were to be made into docile bodies that declined any symbolically "disruptive" performances (as defined by school rules, classroom rules, and the expectations of adult authority figures concerning "proper" student behavior, in short the whole authoritarian apparatus of the school system), and then leaving it at that.

Such a theory can be extrapolated from the symbolic anthropology of Victor Turner, with especial reference to the notion of "social drama." For Turner, the social drama was the ongoing performance of a society as a whole, and was characterized by the notion of crisis: social dramas began with a breach in the social order, which leads to crisis, to a redressive ritual (through which the tensions of the crisis work themselves through), and which culminates in the reintegration of the social order or the recognition of an irreparable schism within such an order.

The connection between social drama and performance is analogous to the connection made in disciplinary schooling between the purposes of schooling and classroom management. The purposes of schooling are implicit within the disciplinary process; students are to attend school for a standard 180-day school year, where they are to learn skills as enumerated in a standard curriculum that is generated by the State and interpreted by each district and school), and classroom management is conceived as the set of techniques through which each student is to comply with the abovestated purposes of schooling. Critical schooling, of course, would put both goals of disciplinary schooling and techniques of classroom management under question.

Framing Dropouts appears to follow the pattern of social drama that Victor Turner describes: According to Fine, there are various crisis moments in the lives of the students, and the "redressive ritual" for these crisis moments appears to be the ritual of schooling -- only, for Fine, the schooling fails in its ritual capacity, and the end result is a schism within the social order, the schism created by a high dropout rate.

In an essay titled "Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual and Drama?" (from pp. 291-301 of Victor Turner's On the Edge of the Bush), Turner graphs what he sees as the relationship between social drama, by which we mean the social order (or "politics") as conceived in performative mode, and performed drama (and in this instance we mean not merely drama on the stage but also the drama observed by the ethnographer: the classroom session, the staff meeting etc.).

Figure 1. The interrelationship of social drama or stage (or performed) drama (Turner 1985, p. 300).

The noteworthy thing about this graph is that it links the staged drama to the social drama, and that these dramas are linked through "implicit" phases of social activity. The implicit social process is easy to describe: social drama needs to pass through a phase of ratiocination, of working-through of social norms and needs of the moment, before it becomes any particular performed drama. Thus, in observing the performed drama of the rituals of schooling, one should be able to observe the results of the "working-through of social norms" regarding schooling, most importantly (for this study) the norms regarding "what school is for." This theoretical notion of implicit social process is precisely the reason why I am importing Victor Turner's theories of symbol, myth, ritual, social drama, his whole framework for anthropological study which has been labeled "symbolic anthropology" into a system which looks suspiciously like a relative of the historical systems of schooling described in Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Turner's framework will also underscore the complexity of the debate about "what school is for," rather than narrow it down to the notion that school is a locus of production for some particular product such as test scores. School is "for" something if we can see this purpose within the performed rituals and symbols of schooling. And, Turner implies, we can understand these rituals as performing moves within overall social dramas, giving them a more widely encompassing focus than we would give them if we were to look merely at "discipline" as the "political economy of detail" without looking at the political economy of discipline.

So, to a certain extent, Turner's theories for looking at symbol, ritual, performance, and social drama mirror the explication of "discipline" as the "political economy of detail" in Foucault's Discipline and Punish. But, whereas Foucault focuses upon "the meticulous control of the operations of the body" (137), or rather the technique of creating docile bodies, I want to take a step back and look at what the technique and the docile bodies mean to a larger process, the process of schooling as it occurs in southern California. In the context of this larger drama, I would incorporate Foucault within Turner thusly: I would look at the performed drama (with especial attention to its political economy of detail), to understand its connection (via Turnerian concepts such as the "social structure" and the "liminal" rituals that dissipate its effect) to the larger "social drama."

Returning to Turner's graph of social dramas and performed dramas, the implicit rhetorical structure, on the other hand, is, I suppose, what structuralist-functionalists have labeled the "structure" of a society, but is clearly more than that. I have created an analogous graph to illustrate what I think is going on with the politics of education:

Fig. 2. The interrelationship between the performance of school ritual and the manifest politics of school.

The social drama of school systems (considered as whole systems) provide a sort of "manifest politics" as reflected in the curriculum, which then (when combined with the hidden curriculum and the thinking of each participant in the schooling process) becomes the implicit social process informing the performance of school, i.e. what goes on inside each classroom every day. This mass performance of the schooling process generates a politics of culture, which, in its turn, affects the social drama (usually in a passive way, however.)

In order to focus more specifically on the phenomena of schooling, I have composed a graph with the same structure as Turner's, and similar (yet different) terms. My graph seeks to outline performances in school, to connect them to a phenomenon I call politics, because it is directed by a politicized, democratically accounable hierarchy. Manifest politics is a performed entity, but one that sometimes produces texts, especially as concerns written laws that govern schooling. The implicit social process is a symbolic working-through, which is sometimes a text but is more commonly the spoken words of the participants in schooling. The performance of school life is of course a performed communication, and it in its turn generates the politics of culture, an interpretation of this performed communication that have some cultural bearing upon politics, as a producer of school culture.

Within this system as I have graphed it above, the politics of culture (as generated by the performance of school) plays a passive role, mostly defining "what school is" or subjunctively "what school should be" so that school can be a cultural object of scrutiny for the parents, District authorities, politicians, and other involved adult onlookers of the schooling process, those which have political control over school systems. Schools don't usually produce political actions. But the things that happen within their boundaries, exerting no political force in themselves, are things with latent political importance.

The following chapters of this dissertation will place a special emphasis upon interpreting the texts that bear upon the substitute teacher, and showing how they indicate a "politics" to the culture that surrounded me. Mostly, I will look at texts that construct a picture of (or for) the substitute teacher: my notes, my lesson plans, books that offer advice to substitute teachers, and general advice on "classroom management." From there, I will discursively evaluate the discourse of classroom management as a guide to the successful performance of instructional ritual, in order to understand the political danger of instructional ritual that is completely scripted, that has become a charade performed to maintain order in the classroom without producing any student communication of importance. The result is that two separate scripts are created; one that dominates in the classroom, and another, a counterscript, that is the object of student learning in "language arts" (and a subsequent influence upon the culture of the students themselves), but which has no value in the classroom.

What does "classroom management" do for such completely-scripted classrooms, what happens to classroom scripts when the substitute teacher is there, and what is the political value of the performance of instructional ritual within classrooms, are questions which will be asked.

So, in the following analyses of the discourses and performances I observed/ composed as a substitute teacher, I will emphasize the difference between manifest politics and latent politics as being important to our understanding of how the performance of school life, with emphasis upon the communicatings of teachers and students within the confines of classroom activities, can be political.

Chapter 3
Chapter 1