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"The Lady From North Carolina": The Perils And Limitations Of External Expertise, Aprille J. Phillips, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This paper examines a state department of education’s (SDE) decision to contract a consultant to “turnaround” schools, per a logic of outsourcing for external expertise. Our ethnographically informed case study explores whose knowledge had the most worth in diagnosing areas for improvement and identifies this case as part of a trend to rent competencies, under a neoliberal guise of efficiency, but at the expense of system capacity or learning.