Abstract
What is the relationship between national education policy and local educational realities in the United States within the context of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation? NCLB imposed a centralized set of mandates, backed up by punitive accountability requirements, on US schools. In the process, local realities and their historical contexts are dismissed as irrelevant to the overall goal of boosting academic achievement. This chapter notes the parallels between the US situation (the ‘Center’ imposing a one-size-fits-all frame on local realities) and the ongoing debates in the teaching of English internationally regarding the dominance of instructional policies and methodologies imposed by academic and commercial interests in Western English-speaking countries (the ‘Center’) with little regard for the histories and contexts of local non-Western communities and classrooms in the ‘Periphery.’ Contrasting four ethnographic accounts of English language teaching contexts in the United States with the mandates of NCLB, the author suggests that English language learners will be left behind if the definition and implementation of quality education in a given setting are not co-constructed by the communities and educators within the local and historical context of each school and community.
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Meyer, L.M. (2007). Methods, Meanings and Education Policy in the United States. In: Cummins, J., Davison, C. (eds) International Handbook of English Language Teaching. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 15. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-46301-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-46301-8_16
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