The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have anchored an education policy apparatus that seeks to reconstruct much of the work of curriculum, teaching, and teacher education. However, teachers and teacher education faculty have often struggled to recognize the specific ideas and practices that education policies mobilize to steer their actions, institutions, and professions toward particular values and outcomes. This Forum essay adopts a governmentality perspective on the CCSS to draw attention to its political rationalities and the work that standards do to govern educators at a distance and to influence how they govern their own conduct. This is not a critique of the Common Core, but a brief reading of CCSS publications in their own terms to highlight their neoliberal governmentality and the ways they have positioned the Standards to steer curriculum, teaching, and teacher education through high-stakes testing, outcomes-based performance management, and the privatization, automation, and outsourcing of core educational processes.

This study identified historical continuities and discontinuities across a century of secondary research published in English Journal (1912–1966) and Research in the Teaching of English (1967–2011). It highlights considerable methodological continuity across six decades of English Journal and some shifts in research emphases that tended to echo changing emphases in psychological research, curriculum reforms, and critiques of traditional linguistics. The analysis of secondary research published in Research in the Teaching of English explores how RTE emerged in 1967 with a definition of empirical social science that both expanded and contracted practices of positivist research and also excluded traditions of practitioner research and humanities-based research that had been published for decades in EJ. Next, the study tracks patterns of continuity and change across RTE from the late 1960s to the present, including shifts in secondary research that seemed to echo shifts in behavioral science (1960s–1980s), cognitive psychology (1980s), and the onset of “sociocultural” research (early 1990s to present). The article concludes with a brief discussion of overarching impressions of continuity and change in secondary research, the place of “science” within the NCTE imprint, and a call for more historical research in English education.