State Reforms Threaten Remote Community Life

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of administrators, faculty, parents and community members in one remote Michigan school district. The purpose of the study is to describe and explain how Michigan's educational reform perspective--arguably similar to the education reform perspectives of many states--encountered the educational perspective of members of one of the state's most remote communities. I described education's reform perspective, noted its conceptual coherence and conformity with calls for an improved - that is, more demanding, progressive, coordinated and centralised - system. The goal was to understand how that perspective encounters the educational perspective of a remote community. Put simply, the results suggested that Michigan's educational reform perspective poses a direct threat to that community. (Contains 4 notes.)