The paper deals with local school and community influences (typically, agentic effects) on system-wide educational message systems (typically, structuring effects) that are often read as resulting from ‘global forces’ or ‘travelling policies’ that have asserted and entrenched neoliberal norms and values within education. I am particularly interested in local manifestations of neoliberal messages which, looked at from a bottom-up perspective, seem to deny agency and push educators towards conservative, results-oriented, mandated educational practices, or at least constrain agency by imposing a policy structure which is reinforced by general acceptance of a measurement paradigm. I examine the seemingly innocuous ‘school effectiveness’ discourse in this light. Although it is only one element of the neo-liberal policy complex, ‘school effectiveness’ is a powerful concept that has enormous purchase in education debates in most countries. I argue that the notion of school effectiveness acts as what Ball calls a 'relay device' for the implementation in schools of other key neoliberal policy elements that tend to restrict teachers as they go about doing their educational work. I provide ethnographic illustrations of contestation of the neoliberal paradigm in community-oriented school reform efforts which take seriously notions of democratic and culturally-relevant schooling. In accepting that there has been a global hardening of educational policy regimes, in which education has largely become positioned as a site of economic planning, I try to demonstrate that globalization theories are not sufficient to explain the ideosyncratic local dynamics of schools as organizations. I use ethnographic data to show that it is not necessarily the case that schools no longer try to accommodate the full diversity of students, although it may be true that both market arrangements in education and the heavy compliance regimes under which schools typically operate do push schools towards an impersonal homogeneity that is characterized by remote ‘standards’. Students and teachers do not necessarily turn themselves into the kinds of people demanded by ostensibly ‘high performing’ and ‘effective’ schools that succeed in market competition, even though they might be expected to. In particular, I draw on ethnographic research that indicates that, in schools in areas where young people have been 'put at a disadvantage' (to use Smyth's terminology), and where poor test results might be expected to be explained by 'deficit' logic, instances of counter-power power working through the engagement of schools with family and community in influencing student engagement in learning in the interests of the currently marginalized young people can be found.

The research reported employs ethnographic methods, largely interview and participant observation, and is influenced by theoretical framework of critical ethnography [see Angus (1986) Research traditions, ideology and critical ethnography, Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education , 7(1), pp. 61-77.

The paper reports the extent to which local educators are able, againsts the thrust of a generalized policy framework in education which troubles them, to promote serious educational reforms that they believe will be in the interests of currently marginalized young people in the area. In effect, I am following Paul Willis in attempting ‘to represent local experience at the grassroots and its connections to the operations of larger institutional and macro forces’ (Willis 2003, p. 390) as teachers and citizens attempt to reform their local schools and build their community in socially just ways.