“Straight” A’s: How Deviance Knots Made Standards-Based Literacy Policy a Gendered Racial Project

Andrew Stein, Northwestern University

Education research finds harmful impacts of exclusionary curriculum on students and communities who are marginalized based on race and gender. Less understood are when, how, and why racial and gender biases intersect in upstream processes of policy development to shape exclusionary curriculum and structure conditions of inequitable learning. Using process tracing of archival documents to conduct a historical case study of U.S. federal literacy policy from the opening of a policy window in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) to the erasure of diverse literacies in policy texts shaping the National Education Goals (1989), this paper conceptualizes literacy education governance as a gendered racial project of nation-building. In so doing, it illuminates the political efficacy of a discursive mechanism that I call “deviance knots” — by which education reform has (re)produced hierarchical systems of not only race and gender, but also class and sexuality. The analysis demonstrates how the “excellence” movement tied deviance knots to interweave national moral panics, gain political legitimacy, and sew a gendered racial narrative in ostensibly race- and gender-neutral policy, which attributed rising illiteracy and underachievement to Black and Brown family behavior and federal policy under the Great Society. In turn, standards-based literacy policies created normative boundaries around curriculum, citizenship, and family structure in ways that neglected and erased Black and Brown women’s and queer communities’ literacy practices and kinship forms. This analysis provides traction for researchers interested in educational politics and policy and the politics of knowledge production about social identity formation and classification.

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 Presented in Session 3. Visibility and Exclusion