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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• gender achievement gap
• equity
• failing boys
• global education policy field
• PISA
• neoliberal governance

Acknowledgement

This paper is based on a SSHRC (Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada)-funded project entitled: Beyond the crisis of failing boys: Investigating which boys and which girls are underachieving (410-2010-0599).

Notes

1. Our critique of ‘gap talk’ is informed by engagement with Gillborn (2008) who argues that “talk of ‘closing’ and/or ‘narrowing’ gaps operates as a discursive strategy whereby statistical data are deployed to construct the view that things are improving and the system is moving in the right direction” (65). Within the context of this paper our concern is to highlight how ‘gap talk’ is deployed politically to steer education policy in directions which eschew careful attention to performance gaps between multiple and intersecting categories of analysis such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, geographical location. It is not that achievement gaps should not be the focus of policy intervention. Rather we argue that attention needs to be devoted to the categories in use and the epistemological frameworks that govern the use of numbers.

2. In Canada education remains the exclusive responsibility of each province with each province appointing its own Minister of Education. There is no Federal or National Minister of Education.

3. The ‘policy habitus’ refers specifically to a particular field and interconnected networks of relations and flows of discourses in which policy making is implicated. As Lingard, Rawolle, and Taylor (2005) explicate a policy habitus refers to dispositional tendencies of policy makers and emphasizes the sedimentation of history, structure and culture in individual disposition to practice (764). With regards to ‘failing boys’ as an object of the education policy making field, we identify a particular logics of practice governing policy making as it relates to the constitution of a gender achievement gap and the designation of boys as a disadvantaged group which has a particular history in terms of its backlash against feminism and recuperative impetus and is implication in certain value systems and discourses. These value systems are reflected in certain dispositional tendencies of policy makers and are connected to a broader masculinity politics. For example, numbers and ‘gap talk’ function politically and are used by both policy makers and the media to establish the terms for policy intervention and there are scalar aspects to such flows of discourses and logics about gender achievement gaps. OECD PISA data and publications, for example, function as a reference point and technology of governance within a global education policy field, with effects for steering equity education policy within nations and also at the provincial level, and are governed by a particular logics of practice pertaining to the designation of boys as a disadvantaged category. It is such logics of practice that characterize the policy habitus of boys’ education.

4. Power and Frandji (2010) draw on Fraser (1997) who explicates the need to attend to the politics of both redistribution and recognition in addressing fundamental questions of social injustice.

5. PCAP is administered by the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) who set up a working group in 2003 comprising representatives from various jurisdictions and an external authority on measurement theory to develop a large scale assessment tool and program that has been administered to a sampling of 13 year old students in all provinces and territories. Students were assessed in Mathematics, Science and Reading in 2003 and 2010 and this testing regime needs to be understood as part of elaborating federalism in Canadian schooling.

6. It is important to note here that while PISA is an international comparison of national system performance, in Canada we are dealing with provinces, with Ontario’s education system being singled out as high performing. Similarly with the case of China, it is Shanghai, as highlighted by Sellar and Lingard (Forthcoming).

7. Lingard and Douglas (1999) coined this term which refers to a backlash and defensive gender politics committed to reinstalling traditional notions of masculinity and patriarchal power relations.