This case study acknowledges the multidimensionality of educational policy, teacher practice, and discourses about school reform. The need for improved learning environments from the perspectives of and for the benefit of teachers as integral parts of the school improvement process was an impetus for this study which advances the need for teacher-based educational policy analyses. The study’s purpose was to examine perceptions, and evaluations associated with the discourses and implementation of the Title I School Improvement Grant (SIG) Program’s Transformation and Turnaround Models using a theoretical and conceptual framework that combined educational policy as discourse and Critical Race Theory with an ecological view of the contexts in which the policy rests. Findings showed that teacher-based policy analyses accounted for multiple figures, processes, sociocultural conditions, discourses, and the impact of time and timing when explaining teachers' lived experiences under the grant and the meaning they associated with those experiences. The potential of the SIG program was found to be impacted by district-teacher relationships, the sociocultural contexts of learning and teaching, and district-principal relationships, which in turn, effected the teachers by enhancing and weakening their professional capacity, strengthening cohesion within the school, and by fostering divisive and chaotic school climates. The variations among those effects was closely associated with the leadership of superintendents, the alignment of policy interpretation, a focused sense of vision for the school and district, as well the sequencing of key policy decisions. Final analyses indicated that the teachers benefitted from the capacity-building initiatives and personnel associated with the SIG program but found (1) its assumptions to be flawed, (2) the localized processes of implementation inhibited their roles as teachers and stakeholders in the school’s success while also holding them accountable for sociocultural conditions beyond their control, (3) the mandated replacement of principals and teachers to be lacking in flexibility and contextualization, and (4) the contributions made by the mandated replacements to dominant discourses about teacher inadequacy to be troubling. Analyses of teachers' narratives revealed varying levels of sociocultural knowledge about their students and students' families such that teachers (1) were pleased to work in a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse school, (2) defended the provision of quality education to critics of urban schools, (3) and yet re-inscribed discourses of Whiteness.
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