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Educational Policy
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What's this?

You Just Feed Them With a Long-Handled Spoon

Families Evaluate Their Experiences in a Class Size Reduction Reform

M. Elizabeth Graue

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Denise Oen

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Emerging from an evaluation of Wisconsin’s Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program (SAGE), a multidimensional program popularly known for its class size reduction component, this article examines SAGE’s lighted schoolhouse initiative aimed to strengthen links between home and school. Drawing on family focus groups held at nine SAGE schools, we use Bakhtin’s tools of addressivity and answerability to explore how families constructed locally specific identities within particular community contexts. Family discussions focused on responding to needs: family social needs, the need for social connection, and perceived answerability felt by families for their community. We suggest that schools would be more successful in building relationships if they used the potential power promised in class size reduction programs and developed programming focused on the needs and resources of families in particular communities rather than imagining a generic, one-size-fits-all model of parents.

Key Words: class size reduction • home—school relations • Bakhtin

This version was published on September 1, 2009

Educational Policy, Vol. 23, No. 5, 685-713 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0895904808321271
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