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The authors use Noddings (1984; 1992; 1999) and Beauboeuf-Lafontant's (2002) theories of caring in education to look at how race (conceptualized to include Whiteness) affected the implementation of the A+ Schools Program, an arts-based reform designed to augment student achievement and appreciation for the arts. They examine the implementation of the A+ Schools Program in three very different schools, with a particular focus on instruction and pedagogy. One school, Mountain Top, located in the mountains in the western part of North Carolina is all White. The second school, Piedmont Elementary, is located in an urban setting in the center of the state. Predominantly African American, it is more racially diverse than the other two schools, with Whites comprising about 20% of the population. The third school, Jackson, located in a rural, northeast corner of the state, is over 90% African American. These cases illustrate the importance of race in understanding how caring and educational reform are defined and enacted in schools. The authors maintain that the enactment of caring and educational reform must include claiming a school's racial identity and an acknowledgement that the world is a place where race matters. Furthermore, they assert that both caring and the interpretation of educational reform are not racially neutral. Reform expresses the race of the people who design it and those who implement it. Practitioners, policymakers, and researchers must make race an explicit focus of educational reform rather than merely letting race play out in unexamined ways. Their analysis in this article explicitly contradicts the ideology of colorblindness.

Explores how deeply held cultural assumptions influenced one urban elementary school's efforts to implement a voluntarily- adopted arts-based initiative. While school staff members embraced the reform, there was little or no change in teaching practice. The article examines how staff constructed meaning around the program and its interaction with a state-mandated accountability program. (SM)

The article focuses on the role played by race in the implementation of A+ Schools Program in three elementary schools in North Carolina. It examines the importance of race in understanding how educational caring and reform are defined and implemented at Mountain Top Elementary, Piedmont Elementary, and Jackson Elementary, using the caring theories of Ned Noddings and Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant. Relative to the authors' experiences and understandings, they contend that educational caring and reform are not racially neutral, in which educational reforms demonstrate the race of the peoples involve in its implementation.

In this article, we compare two North Carolina public schools that were simultaneously implementing reforms with seemingly different orientations, the A+ School Program and the ABCs of Public Education. We use the literature on caring and critiques of bureaucracy as a framework to look at the concurrent implementation of two educational reforms in North Carolina. We discuss data from a 5 year longitudinal study and critique our own assumptions as we develop portraits of schools that are both situated and complex. We do this to explore the question: In what ways does educational reform actually change educational practice? We develop a framework that articulates a critique of bureaucracy from the standpoint of caring, locate the culture of each school within the theoretical framework, and analyze how the culture of schools affects the implementation of educational reform. We conclude that reform is deeply cultural and that ethnographic methods are essential to understanding educational reform efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]