The uncertain value of school knowledge: Biology at Westridge High

This article describes and analyzes the surprisingly uncertain value of sch ool science in an academically prestigious high school at a time when refor m in science education is again tr national priority. In a cultural analysi s focused on school lessons, if traces how school participants produce a ve ritable absence of science in science classes and how the production is sen sible, ol understandable, given their particular institutional and social c ircumstances. What emerges, too, is the extraordinary reach, or complexity, of ordinary school lessons. However unevenly or intricately, lessons move from teacher plans to student responses, beyond events in classrooms to thr culture of a school, across contemporary hybrids of divergent curricular r ationales to long-Last historical debates, while travelling between subject matter knowledge and status politics. Seeing their reach allows us to unde rstand the longstanding muddlement of knowledge in U.S. schools, as well as what we can do about it.