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An ethnographic study of one football season in a small South Texas town is presented to explore the extent that community sport is, as various critical theorists have suggested, a potential site for counterhegemonic cultural practices. Football is conceptualized as a major community ritual that socializes future generations of youth. This broad, holistic description of socialization also notes various moments of ethnic resistance engendered by the Chicano civil rights movement. Other moments of class and gender resistance to the football ritual are also noted. Finally, the way players generally resisted attempts to thoroughly rationalize their sport is also described. In spite of these moments of resistance, this study ultimately shows how deeply implicated community sport—in this case high school football—is in the reproduction of class, gender, and racial inequality. The white ruling class and the town’s patriarchal system of gender relations are preserved in spite of concessions to the new ethnic challenges. When seen from a historical community perspective, sport may be less a site for progressive, counterhegemonic practices than critical sport theorists hope.

HE DECEMBER 2000 Kappan featured a very important contribution to the current discourse on standards-based school reform. "Thinking Carefully About Equity and Accountability," by James Scheurich, Linda Skrla, and Joseph Johnson, invited readers to take part in a dialogue on these issues. 1 At the heart of our disagreement with Scheurich and his colleagues is the subject of the standardsbased school reform movement, which has come to dominate most discussions in education today and which has spawned a great deal of scholarly literature, conferences, symposia, and even litigation. We wish to focus here on several misconceptions, omissions, and flaws in the argument put forth by Scheurich and his colleagues. We have organized our response around the following points: the common ground we share, the flaws in their "historic possibilities" thesis, their misconception of accountability as a dichotomy, and our vision of equity and accountability.

This article reviews the anthropological debate on why some ethnic minorities fail more frequently in schools. Although neither side presents overwhelming empirical evidence, John Ogbu's caste theory is clearly a more comprehensive, systematic explanation than the “cultural difference” explanation. In addition, Ogbu's “multilevel” or macro style of school ethnography has important methodological advantages over the less historical, more decontextualized micro ethnographies of classrooms. Nevertheless, as various micro ethnographers have pointed out, caste theory has difficulty accounting for in‐group variance and the school success of some oppressed ethnic minorities. Results from a field study in South Texas are used to illustrate that Ogbu's notion of an “oppositional culture” does underestimate both in‐group variation and the self‐valorizing potential of ethnic oppositional cultures. The school‐level description of students' “dramaturgical communicative competence” demonstrates why many middle‐class Mexicanos are not held back by their ethnic oppositional culture. The article ends by advocating a model of macro school ethnography that is based on a multiple dominance view of society and a phenomenological notion of ethnic culture rather than caste theory.

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