Selling the market - Educational standards, discourse and social inequality

The call for national and state-level educational standards has swept acros s the American educational scene in the last 15 years. Using a language of competition, fair play and equal treatment, standards advocates have captur ed a broad spectrum of both conservative and liberal support. Drawing upon journalistic reports, advocacy documents and interview data, this article p resents an analysis of interconnected aspects of the evolution of education al reform discourse, in particular, advocacy from the leadership of a natio nal teachers' union and classroom teachers' situated responses to ongoing c hanges. Critically appropriating from Fairclough's analytic schema and comm ensurable concepts in Silverstein and Urban, I analyze interactional figure s and socio-political themes involved in the elite and non-elite discourse of standards, with particular focus on the neo-liberal trope of a 'new era of work' and associated fears of increasing inequality. I conclude by asses sing the differing strengths of the two frameworks as well as the role of d iscourse analysis more generally in critical social inquiry.