Goli Rezai-Rashti - Böcker

Globalizing Educational Accountabilities analyzes the influence that international and national testing and accountability regimes have on educational policy reform efforts in schooling systems around the world. Tracing the evolution of those regimes, with an emphasis on the OECD’s PISA, it reveals the multiple effects of policy as numbers in countries with different types of government and different education systems. From the effect of Shanghai’s PISA success on nations trying to compete economically to the perverse effects of linking funding to performance targets in Australia, the analysis links testing and accountability to new modes of network governance, new spatialities, and the significance of data infrastructures. This highly illustrative text offers scholars and policy makers a critical policy sociology framework for doing education policy analysis today.

This book fills a gap in the literature by focusing on globalization with regard to the rescaling of educational accountabilities, linked to international and national testing regimes and their impact. In particular, this book examines the impact and effects of this global framework in two illustrative nations: Australia and Canada. The focus on these two nations, which have very different forms of federalism, allows for consideration of the rescaling of politics and policies in the context of globalization and for an analysis of the complex rescaling of educational accountabilities. It is the first book to document and analyse the multi-scalar, relational and differentiated effects in national schooling systems of this rescaling of educational accountability. The authors also consider the ways in which these accountability regimes have rearticulated social justice and equity policies within nations in reductive ways. It offers scholars and policy makers both a methodology and an epistemological framework grounded in critical policy sociology for doing education policy analysis in a time of neo-liberal globalization.

This book provides an illuminating account of teachers’ own reflections on their experiences of teaching in urban schools. It was conceived as a direct response to policy-related and media-generated concerns about male teacher shortage and offers a critique of the call for more male role models in elementary schools to address important issues regarding gender, race and the politics of representation. By including the perspectives of minority teachers and students, and by drawing on feminist, queer and anti-racist frameworks, this book rejects the familiar tendency to resort to role modelling as a basis for explaining or addressing boys’ disaffection with schooling. Indeed, the authors argue, on the basis of their research in urban schools in Canada and Australia, that educational policy concerned with male teacher shortage and the plight of disadvantaged minority boys would benefit from engaging with analytic perspectives and empirical literature that takes readers beyond hegemonic discourses of role modelling. A compelling case is presented for the need to disarticulate discourses about role modelling from a politics of representation that is committed to addressing the reality of the impact of racial and structural inequalities on both minority teachers and students’ participation in the education system. The book also provides insight into the persistence of gender inequality as it relates to the status of elementary school teaching as women’s work.

This book provides an illuminating account of teachers’ own reflections on their experiences of teaching in urban schools. It was conceived as a direct response to policy-related and media-generated concerns about male teacher shortage and offers a critique of the call for more male role models in elementary schools to address important issues regarding gender, race and the politics of representation. By including the perspectives of minority teachers and students, and by drawing on feminist, queer and anti-racist frameworks, this book rejects the familiar tendency to resort to role modelling as a basis for explaining or addressing boys’ disaffection with schooling. Indeed, the authors argue, on the basis of their research in urban schools in Canada and Australia, that educational policy concerned with male teacher shortage and the plight of disadvantaged minority boys would benefit from engaging with analytic perspectives and empirical literature that takes readers beyond hegemonic discourses of role modelling. A compelling case is presented for the need to disarticulate discourses about role modelling from a politics of representation that is committed to addressing the reality of the impact of racial and structural inequalities on both minority teachers and students’ participation in the education system. The book also provides insight into the persistence of gender inequality as it relates to the status of elementary school teaching as women’s work.

Around the globe, various kinds of testing, including high stakes national census testing, have become meta-policies, steering educational systems in particular directions, and having great effects on schools and on teacher practices, as well as upon student learning and curricula. There has also been a complementary global aspect to this with the OECD’s PISA and IEA’s TIMSS and PIRLS, which have had impacts on national education systems and their policy frameworks. While there has been a globalized educational policy discourse that suggests that high stakes standardised testing will drive up standards and enhance the quality of a nation’s human capital and thus their international economic competitiveness, this discourse still manifests itself in specific, vernacular, path dependent ways in different nations. High stakes testing and its effects can also be seen as part of the phenomenon of the ‘datafication’ of the world and ‘policy as numbers’, linked to other reforms of the state, including new public management, network governance, and top-down and test-based modes of accountability. This edited collection provides theoretically and empirically informed analyses of these developments. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.