It is not news that managerial discourses have dominated government educational policy and programs in Australia since the mid 1980s. During this period there has also been a proliferation of discourses about literacy. The common sense view is that literacy empowers disadvantaged people and assists failing economies. The last decade and a half has seen a discursive shift from education as a human right to education as a government investment. However, the effects of managerial discourses in actual classrooms--preferred pedagogies, enacted curriculum, assessment practices, classroom talk, and allocation of time--are rarely studied and difficult to ascertain. This paper considers the ways in which managerial discourses impact on what teachers and students can do and say in literacy lessons. The paper aims to show the potential of Foucauldian interpretative analytics for examining the local material effects of discursive practices in the everyday institutional lives of teachers and students. It illustrates how managerialist discourses were deployed and contested in one disadvantaged school community in South Australia. The paper provides active analysis of how and where such discursive practices insinuate themselves in the minute details of everyday life, and at the same time it seeks to signal the risks of a managerialist discourse for disadvantaged students. (Contains 38 references, and 4 figures and 3 tables of data.) (NKA)