Principals, Power, and Policy: Enacting “Supplemental Educational Services” JILL KOYAMA University at Buffalo, SUNY Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools that do not make adequate yearly progress must offer afterschool tutoring, entitled “Supplemental Educational Services” (SES). Drawing on 40 months of ethnographic research and utilizing actor–network theory, this article shows principals co-opting the SES provisions to do what they determine is required for their schools, often in defiance of NCLB. It demonstrates how, within an increasingly centralized governance of public schools and heightened private intervention, principals emerge as powerful policy actors. [principal, policy, actor–network theory, NCLB, SES] No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a federal intervention policy aimed at closing achievement gaps through elevated academic standards and annual assessments, is not a radical shift in educational policy but, rather, a reflection of an increased emphasis on efficiency, account- ability, and standardization in American schooling, as well as a tendency toward priva- tizing public education. Evoking what has become the “common vocabulary of education policy across the US” (Lipman 2000:1), NCLB is built on the premise that schools alone are unable to close the achievement gaps across social class and racial fissures and that they are in need of outside, often businesslike, intervention. By combining an “intrusive federal presence” (Wells 2009:7) with an increased privatization of educational support and ser- vices (Burch 2006), NCLB alters the relationships among private business, governmental agencies, and public schools. In a provision unique to NCLB, Title I schools that do not make adequate yearly progress (AYP) as set by state educational agencies for three consecutive years must offer additional out-of-school tutoring, entitled “Supplemental Educational Services” (SES), provided by state-approved companies, the majority of which are private. Typically, these companies offer tutoring in mathematics and English during afterschool programs. While out-of-school intervention is not novel, SES, a nearly untested, yet mostly uncontested, component of NCLB, legitimizes the intercession of the private sector into public educa- tion (Koyama 2010; Sunderman 2007). By mandating “failing” public schools to contract with educational support companies, NCLB privatizes afterschool programs, “redrawing the public–private divide, reallocating tasks, and rearticulating the relationships between organizations and tasks across this divide” (Jessop 2002:199). These federally mandated public–private hybrids draw attention to spaces outside of government educational insti- tutions and agencies as important sites of policymaking. Although the participation of educational businesses in educational policy has become commonplace, their activities have largely been understudied. This article considers the roles of a for-profit SES provider and school principals as they implement NCLB- mandated SES programs in schools. Remarkably, within an increasingly centralized governance of public schools and a preponderance of private intervention, the principals emerge as powerful policy actors as they “appropriate” SES in their schools, creatively incorporating elements into their “own schemes of interest, motivation, and action” (Levinson and Sutton 2001:3). This piece reveals the ways in which SES directors and managers aim to influence the local policy choices, only to be outmaneuvered by the actions of DOE officials and school principals. Principals essentially (re)make policy as Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 42, Issue 1, pp.20–36, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492. © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2010.01108.x. 20