Purpose: The study investigates the ways in which principals engage with, and attend to, the data-driven accountability measures of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and local mandates. Theoretical framework: The study is framed with the notion of assemblage , a term often associated with actor-network theory (ANT)—a theory that focuses analytic attention on how disparate actors, material, and discursive practices come together to form dynamic associations. Within the assemblage, principals are situated as bricoleurs. Research methods and data: Data for analysis come from interviews conducted with 45 New York City principals between June 2005 and October 2008 as part of a larger ethnographic study examining NCLB, and a series of interviews with 12 of the 45 principals, conducted annually through March 2012. District surveys, various documents, and field notes of participant observation also inform the study. Findings: Principals play active policy roles in negotiating federal regulations and local initiatives, as well as selectively performing assessment and accountability mandates. Principals, who have often been cast in the media as either dupes of the state or as active resistors, negotiate and appropriate external accountability in innovative, sometimes savvy, ways. Implications for practice and research: Principals need to consider institutional circumstances and external accountability not as boundaries or constraints, but rather as available material with which to respond. Future research should aim to examine the ways in which principals engage with data and accountability demands via reflexive interactions with different types of knowledge, mediating artifacts, and methods.

The global movement of people alters our understandings of social mobility. Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected since January 2011 and utilize the notion of assemblage to document and analyze how disparate people, their material objects, and discursive practices are brought together to render refugees as educable, productive, and employable in the United States. I examine the adaptations that result when livelihood paths and educational opportunities become paradoxically diverse due to transnational migrations and are constrained by localized politico-economic environments. My findings complicate the assumption that formal education represents an enduring pathway or necessary precursor to upward social mobility. As refugees are required by resettling agents to become economically self-sufficient as soon as possible, formal education such as English-as-a-second-language courses can limit initial employment opportunities and narrowing families’ livelihood strategies upon resettlement, especially during the recent economic downturn.

Despite the central role schools have played in the resettlement of refugees, we know little about how principals, teachers, parents, and staff at community-based organizations interpret and negotiate national immigration policy and state education policies. Combing critical discourse analysis (CDA) and actor-network theory (ANT), we capture how these actors work together and against each other to enact supports with regard to these newcomer students. Data includes a 36-month ethnography of refugee networks in Arizona. We argue that policies around English language acquisition and academic support further isolate refugee students and diminish their formal learning experiences in the United States.

Refugees in the US are often seen as risk-takers—those who engage in potentially harmful behaviors that simultaneously provide opportunity; with their perceived weaknesses in English language training, overall education, and US cultural capital, refugees are also frequently situated as being “at-risk” of not adapting to their new contexts. In this article, which draws on a two year ethnographic study in a Northeastern city, I trouble the simultaneous positioning of refugees as risk-takers and as being at risk. National policies governing the integration of refugees reduce social and educational adaptation to economic self-sufficiency, resulting in the emergence of three threads of risk: the risk of refugees being dependent on government resources, the risk of refugees “taking” jobs from Americans, and the risk of refugees threatening national security. Here, I focus on the first two threads, which represent a dichotomy of risk narratives, but which also poise refugees as risks to the mythical/idealized quality of American life and economic well-being. I document refugees participating in ESL and career-readiness classes offered by local resettlement agencies to reveal how educators in both ESL and career classes employ the narrative of positive risk-taking to challenge the more negative risk discourses.

This article focuses on the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the USA's broad sweeping federal education policy, in a persistently low-achieving school in which the majority of students are refugees and immigrants. Drawing on a 26-month ethnography, I reveal the ways in which a NCLB-guided school turnaround plan is enacted variably, especially for refugees. I utilize assemblage, a term often associated with actor network perspectives, to study how people, their material objects, and their discursive practices are brought together to implement the plan. Assemblage analysis reveals the struggles and contestations between various entities as they aim to establish the authority and legitimacy of ideas and practices of schooling refugees – most of whom speak languages other than English and have had several prolonged interruptions in their formal education. I trace how certain ideas come to cohere as a more-or-less durable curriculum assemblage, and how they are mobilized, defended, and challenged. The findings reveal that even under the constraints of assessments and sanctions, the assemblage is disrupted and comes apart as new actors, including refugee parents and community leaders, bring unexpected elements into play, introducing emotion, challenging expertise, questioning motives, and resisting the practices produced by the authorized policy actors.