Goli Rezai-Rashti

Testing regimes, accountabilities and education policy: commensurate global and national developments

This paper focuses on outlining, contextualising and theorising the rise of global and complementary national modes of test-based, top-down accountability in schooling systems. The effects of these infrastructures of accountability on schools, teachers’ pedagogical work, on the width of curriculum and on the goals of schooling are also alluded to. These developments are theorised in terms of rescaling of the policy cycle globally, as a well as the topological turn that sees the globe reconstituted as a single space of comparative and commensurate measurement of the performance of school systems, as part of the move to new global forms of networked governance. We argue that we are seeing a new global panopticism, with national school systems variously positioned within the global market place and global educational policy field with important effects within national policy-making. The analysis and theorising provided serves as a contextual backdrop and introduction to the papers included in the special issue of the Journal of Education Policy on the theme of Testing Regimes, Accountabilities and Education Policy. We argue, and the papers demonstrate, the significance for policy sociology today of recognising testing as a, perhaps the, major policy steering systems and the work of schools today.

Black Male Teachers as Role Models: Resisting the Homogenizing Impulse of Gender and Racial Affiliation

This article reports on research with one Black male elementary school teacher in Toronto and draws on feminist, queer, and antiracist analytic perspectives to raise important questions about the discourse of teachers as role models. The voice of this teacher is used to challenge discourses about role modeling in their capacity to address adequately the limits imposed by both cultural and structural problems experienced by minority boys in urban school communities. Important questions about the role of teachers as transformative or organic intellectuals are also raised. A case study approach is employed to draw attention to both important pedagogical issues and the limits of role modeling as a conceptual framework that continues to be used to support generalizable claims about the influence of male teachers on the basis of their gender and racial affiliation with boys in schools. What is required, the authors conclude, is a disarticulation and, hence, a separating out of role modeling from a discussion about the need for a greater representation of minority teachers in urban schools.

Male teacher shortage: black teachers’ perspectives

In this paper the authors draw on the perspectives of black teachers to provide a more nuanced analysis of male teacher shortage. Interviews with two Caribbean teachers in Toronto, Canada, are employed to illuminate the limits of an explanatory framework that foregrounds the singularity of gender as a basis for advocating male teachers as role models. The study concludes that educational policy attempting to address male teacher shortage would benefit from engaging with both analytic frameworks and empirical research that is capable of unravelling the politics of representation and intersectionality as they relate to addressing questions of male teacher shortage in elementary schools.

‘Gap talk’ and the global rescaling of educational accountability in Canada

In this paper, we undertake a particular policy critique and analysis of the gender achievement gap discourse in Ontario and Canada, and situate it within the context of what has been termed the governance turn in educational policy with its focus on policy as numbers and its multi-scalar manifestations. We show how this ‘gap talk’ is inextricably tied to a neoliberal system of accountability, marketization, comparative performance measures and competition within the context of a globalized education policy field. The focus initially is on how the gender achievement gap has emerged in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OCED) publication of the 2009 Program For International Student Assessment Results, but attention is drawn to questions and categories of equity that are used to define and measure socio-economic disadvantage. We illustrate that such measures and categories in use function to eschew important aspects of maldistribution, with important consequences for understanding the significance of the interlocking influences of race, social class, gender and geographical location, where there is evidence of spatial concentrations of poverty and histories of cumulative oppression. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the Canadian data to illustrate the multi-scalar dimensions of global/national/provincial ‘policyscapes’ through a politics of numbers. Contrary to the ways in which Canada and specifically Ontario have been marketed and celebrated by OECD and other stakeholders for their high performing, high quality education system in terms of achieving equitable outcomes for diverse student populations, we illustrate how the ‘failing boys’ discourse and achieving ‘gap talk’ have actually functioned to produce a misrecognition of the gender achievement gap, with boys emerging as a disadvantaged category in the articulation of equity policies.

The politics of veiling, gender and the Muslim subject: on the limits and possibilities of anti-racist education in the aftermath of September 11

This paper draws on feminist, postcolonial and queer analytic frameworks to address the pedagogical significance of veiling and the Muslim subject in the aftermath of September 11. It addresses questions related to the knowledge and analytic frameworks needed to engage pedagogically with a politics of difference vis-à-vis the gendered body and practices of veiling in the context of teacher and public school education. The paper discusses implications for developing an approach to anti-racist education that is capable of addressing the limits of Orientalist representations of veiled women, while still entertaining a critique of heteronormativity and sexism as they apply across the Orientalist divide. The pedagogical implications of such tensions are explored in light of drawing on bodies of knowledge that attend to the historical specificity of gender and race relations, as well as engaging with analytic frameworks that inform a knowledge of the body as a cultural signifier. We conclude that a basis for articulating an anti-racist politics must be capable of engaging with a more sophisticated understanding of gender relations, sexuality, agency, and resistance within the context of interrogating narratives about the practices of veiling and unveiling.

Iranian Women's Increasing Access to Higher Education but Limited Participation in the Job Market

Since the 1990s, there has been a significant increase in Iranian women’s participation in higher education. The objective of this article is to investigate whether and how this increased participation and access to education has created employment possibilities for women. This paper is part of a larger research project that examines the participation of women in higher education in Iran. It draws on interview data, secondary sources and government documents to explore more specifically whether there is a relationship between higher education and female labor force participation.

Race, Text, and the Politics of Official Knowledge: A Critical Investigation of a Social Science Textbook in Ontario.

This paper deals with the discourses related to race and anti-racism in a social sciences textbook for grade 12 Ontario students that was published in 2002. It is argued that the complexities of race and anti-racism are not dealt with systematically and cohesively. The textbook does not adequately address the topics of race and racism within the present Canadian social structure, leaving the discussion of complex and controversial ideas concerning race and racism virtually unexplored. In addition, the opportunity to make use of current scholarly work has been ignored or distorted. This is particularly important in light of recent developments regarding the impact of September 11, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’ and the changing dynamic of race relations in North America.

The Politics of Gender Segregation and Women's Access to Higher Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The Interplay of Repression and Resistance.

One of the significant achievements of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the increasing access of women to all levels of education. This paper focuses on womens access to higher education and its unexpected and paradoxical outcomes. Today women in Iran represent over 60% of university students at the undergraduate level. Against the dominant social imaginary of Muslim women, this paper explores how the contradictions and complexities of politics within the Islamic Republic impact womens lives and how women themselves have been able to bring gender justice to the core of Iranian politics.

Gendering in gender research in education: methodological considerations

This introductory paper discusses the methodological and political significance of the processes of gendering in conducting qualitative research on gender and education. It stresses the need to reject epistemological innocence and to be critically reflexive about gendering across all stages of the research process. The significant influence of the feminist legacy in educational research is acknowledged as a basis for the specific critical framing and focus on gendering in the conduct of gender research as it is explicated in this special edition. A primary concern with how various gendered positionalities and spatio-temporalities affect relations in the research field is identified as a thematic focus and emphasis across all manuscripts included in the special edition.

Rethinking the Influence of Male Teachers: Investigating Gendered and Raced Authority in an Elementary School in Toronto

Within the context of debates about male teacher shortage, a powerful discourse about the influence of male and minority teachers as role models has acquired a particular legitimacy in the popular imaginary. In short, the call for more male teachers functions as a commonsense justification for their necessary recruitment and has been tied to a reform strategy for addressing the educational and social needs of boys and minority students in schools (Lingard, Martino, and Mills 2009; Martino 2008; Maylor 2009). In this article, we argue that there are both gendered and raced aspects to teacher authority that are important to consider within the context of debates about the influence of male teachers. In the literature on male teachers and within the context of debates about the call for more male teachers as role models, however, there has been an absence of an analytic focus on and consideration of the various ways in which the dynamics of gender and race are negotiated continuously in everyday interactional settings, particularly as they pertain to policy and curricula-related matters regarding the pedagogic authority of male and female teachers in elementary schools. Odih (2002, 91), for example, specifically draws attention to how the increasing call for more black male teachers as role models from within the black community has been motivated by concerns about the underachievement of black boys, which she notes has been attributed to the prevalence of female teachers, so called ‘‘soft’’ pedagogical practices and matriarchal families in these boys’ lives. In addition, and more broadly within the field of multicultural and anti-racist education, there has been a tendency to rely on racial affiliation and identification as a basis for enhancing minority student achievement and engagement with schooling (McCarthy, Rezai-Rashti, and Teasley 2009). This belief in the pedagogical significance of racial affiliation has led to the call for a diversification of the teaching profession, particularly in those schools serving The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 34:258–281, 2012 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2012.724295