Naz Rassool

School effectiveness: new managerialism, quality and the Japanization of education

School effectiveness is a microtechnology of change. It is a relay device, which transfers macro policy into everyday processes and priorities in schools. It is part of the growing apparatus of performance evaluation. Change is brought about by a focus on the school as a site-based system to be managed. There has been corporate restructuring in response to the changing political economy of education. There are now new work regimes and radical changes in organizational cultures. Education, like other public services, is now characterized by a range of structural realignments, new relationships between purchasers and providers and new coalitions between management and politics. In this article, we will argue that the school effectiveness movement is an example of new managerialism in education. It is part of an ideological and technological process to industrialize educational productivity. That is to say, the emphasis on standards and standardization is evocative of production regimes drawn from industry. There is a belief that education, like other public services can be managed to ensure optimal outputs and zero defects in the educational product.

Sustaining linguistic diversity within the global cultural economy: issues of language rights and linguistic possibilities

This paper draws on ethnographic case‐study research conducted amongst a group of first and second generation immigrant children in six inner‐city schools in London. It focuses on language attitudes and language choice in relation to cultural maintenance, on the one hand, and career aspirations on the other. It seeks to provide insight into some of the experiences and dilemmatic choices encountered and negotiations engaged in by transmigratory groups, how they define cultural capital, and the processes through which new meanings are shaped as part of the process of defining a space within the host society. Underlying this discussion is the assumption that alternative cultural spaces in which multiple identities and possibilities can be articulated already exist in the rich texture of everyday life amongst transmigratory groups. The argument that whilst the acquisition of ‘world languages’ is a key variable in accumulating cultural capital, the maintenance of linguistic diversity retains potent symbolic power in sustaining cohesive identities is a recurring theme.

Language, cultural pluralism and the silencing of minority discourses in England and Wales

Abstract This paper locates the ethnic minority language issue within the broader context of national language policy within the pluralist nation‐state. It is divided into three sections. Section one provides an historical overview of the second language ‘debate’ in England and Wales during the past three decades and discusses it within the absence of a coherent national language policy framework. Section two draws on ethnographic case‐study material obtained in interviews within one school and LEA, and analyses the extent to which, during the last decade, education policy concerns nationally have shifted school priorities in terms of educational provision for second language learners. Section three draws on key issues related to the potential social exclusion of the ethnic minority groups identified in the previous sections. These are discussed within the context of changing migration patterns globally. The dilemmas facing definitions of citizenship within the framework of the projected cultural, economi...

Telecentres and e‐learning

Introduction Many developing countries face a huge challenge in expanding university education for a sizeable proportion of their population to meet the demands of the global knowledge economy. The state university system, currently the largest provider of university education in Sri Lanka, only has around 22 000 places a year for in-person (on campus) education (around 3% of the school leaving age cohort). The government of Sri Lanka investigated options for expanding university education and selected technology-mediated distance education as the preferred option due to perceptions of cost advantages and quality enhancement. Today, both state universities and private institutes offer e-learning to their students with a range of options from fully online delivery to blended or supplementary online delivery. An island-wide network of telecentres was established to provide access to e-learning for students who do not possess their own connectivity.

Paradigm issues: interpreting, identifying and redefining racism within the global cultural economy

The theorization of ‘race’ and racism is notoriously difficult, traversing as it does a complex historical, socio-cultural, geopolitical and economic terrain. The argument that ‘race’, as a category of description, is a social construct is well established in social scientific discourse. Nevertheless, while the concept of ‘race’ has no biological grounding, racism has its ontological basis in human experience; it not only permeates human consciousness, but also is inscribed into the practices and processes of social, economic, cultural and political institutions. Ideologically, racism is grounded in hegemonic discourses of difference and ‘Otherness’ that serve to legitimate cultural, socio-economic and political inequalities, discrimination and disempowerment of particular groups of people. As such it constitutes lived experience and has concrete effects. Permeating the body politic thus, racism is constituted in discursive power relations; it represents a ‘power/ knowledge’ discourse (Foucault 1980) par excellence. Paul Gilroy, in his recent texts Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race and After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, building on his previous work, undertakes the major task of analysing the dominant paradigm of ‘race’ theorization. He focuses on what he terms ‘raciology’, by which I understand him to refer to the ‘scientization’ of racial discourse. That is to say, how the concept of ‘race’ is legitimated in dominant racial discourse; how it is understood and interpreted in formal knowledge frameworks – and how this in turn influences dominant thinking (as well as common-sense understandings). Both books are carefully researched and have an interdisciplinary orientation; the breadth and scope is impressive and provides a textured and nuanced analysis of racial discourse. Gilroy emphasizes the dialogical links between colonial and imperial history and contemporary political conflicts. Key motifs are socially constructed identities and political struggles around ‘race’ and racism, which he explores through the works of major mid-twentieth-century writers such as Du Bois, Fanon, Arendt, Sartre and Malcolm X. He focuses particularly on what he refers to as the ideal of ‘cosmopolitan humanism’ in the work of these writers, which, he argues, is articulated around that ‘special moment’ between the rise of Fascism during the 1930s and decolonization during the late 1950s and 1960s. This represents an underlying theme in his critiques of ‘raciology’ and the emergence of the new paradigm grounded in a