Educational Assessment: reply to Andrew Davis

Assessment is at the heart of teaching as it provides a necessary condition for judging success or failure. It is also necessary to ensure that providers of education are accountable to users and providers of resources. Inferential hazard is an inescapable part of any assessment procedure but cannot be an argument against assessment as such. Rich knowledge may be the aim of education but it does not follow that it is the aim of every stage of education. Teaching to tests is the most natural way of ensuring that teaching matches assessment. Failure to assess places public education in jeopardy.     

Brown Bodies,White Coats: Postcolonialism,Maori women and science

In Aotearoa New Zealand journeys of discovery and colonization were also scientific journeys that brought “Maori woman” under the intellectual control of the emerging “scientific” academy. This paper argues that the historical construction of “Maori woman” through the discourses of Enlightenment science continues to affect the constitution of the subjectivities of Maori women scientists today. The paper draws on a doctoral thesis that used literary historical techniques to investigate the imperial archives and feminist narrative interviews with 16 Maori women scientists to collect the research data. I explore the conditions by which the subject “Maori women scientist” emerges and how the Maori women experience these conditions in relation to how they see themselves. I conclude by arguing that the identity of “Maori woman scientist” appears to be “impossible fiction” due to the fragmented nature of the sign “Maori,” “woman,” and “scientist”, which can be “traced” to the historical construction of the signs.     

Beliefs and Achievement: A Study of Black, White, and Hispanic Children

School achievement among black, white, and Hispanic elementary school children was investigated, and efforts were made to study the beliefs about academic achievement of the children and their mothers. A total of approximately 3,000 first, third, and fifth graders enrolled in 20 schools in the Chicago metropolitan area were given achievement tests in mathematics and reading. Black and Hispanic children performed at a significantly lower level than white children, but at fifth grade ethnic differences in mathematics scores were no longer significant when mothers' education was statistically controlled. This was not the case in reading, where differences were found after controlling for the effects of mothers' education. Interviews with subsamples of approximately 1,000 mothers and children revealed greater emphasis on and concern about education among minority families than among white families. Black and Hispanic children and mothers evaluated the children and their academic abilities highly; they were positive about education and held high expectations about the children's future prospects for education. Mothers of minority children and teachers in minority schools believed more strongly than white mothers and teachers in the value of homework, competency testing, and a longer school day as means of improving children's education.     

The White Working Class,Racism and Respectability: Victims,Degenerates and Interest-Convergence

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that race and class inequalities cannot be fully understood in isolation: their intersectional quality is explored through an analysis of how the White working class were portrayed in popular and political discourse during late 2008 (the timing is highly significant). While global capitalism reeled on the edge of financial melt-down, the essential values of neo-liberalism were reasserted as natural, moral and efficient through two apparently contrasting discourses. First, a victim discourse presented White working people, and their children in particular, as suffering educationally because of minoritised racial groups and their advocates. Second a discourse of degeneracy presented an immoral and barbaric underclass as a threat to social and economic order. Applying the ‘interest-convergence principle’, from Critical Race Theory, the discourses amount to a strategic mobilisation of White interests where the ‘White, but not quite’ status of the working class (Allen, 2009 Allen, R.L. 2009. “What about poor White people?”. In Handbook of Social Justice in Education, Edited by: Ayers, W., Quinn, T. and Stovall, D. 209–230. New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]) provides a buffer zone at a time of economic and cultural crisis which secures societal White supremacy and provides a further setback to progressive reforms that focus on race, gender and disability equality. The existence of poor Whites, therefore, is not only consistent with a regime of White supremacy – they are actually an essential part of the processes that sustain it.     

White on White: Researcher Reflexivity and the Logics of Privilege in White Schools Undertaking Reform

I use this paper to reexamine my role as a White researcher on a multi-racial research team. I reanalyze data I collected during an evaluation project to reveal how I avoided seeing race in the schools I visited and how I dodged discussions of race with members of those school communities. By analyzing my own discursive practice, I introduce a series of logics enacted through a variety of strategies that I used to manage race talk. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) an analysis of the strategies I used to sustain White privilege and (2) an examination of the logics of those strategies in order to understand the power they have in reproducing inequity. Only by understanding the self-perpetuating nature of White privilege will we be able to begin to dismantle it. Jenny Gordon is an assistant professor in the Division of Education, School of Education and Human Development at Binghamton University. She teaches foundations courses for elementary education and courses on qualitative research methods. Her scholarly work includes articles on methodological issues pertaining to qualitative research methods and narratives on the impact of race on research and teaching.     

Multiculturalism,Teaching Slavery,and White Supremacy

This article argues that multiculturalism, especially when it is led and controlled by Whites, and in the absence of collective anti-racist struggles, can reproduce the ontologies, epistemologies, and practices of white supremacy. I use a case study of a reenactment of Atlantic black slavery, produced by white teachers to investigate whether multiculturalism can be more than a technology of white supremacy. I conclude that by employing the restored behaviors of slavery, the reenactment failed to add to an interrogation of whiteness and anti-racism. Instead of contributing to the reformation of whiteness and the empowering of Blacks, it reinforced anti-blackness. I end with a discussion of how to teach slavery ethically.     

White Privilege,Oppression, and Racial Identity Development: Implications for Supervision

Although the U.S. population is becoming increasingly diverse, the race of individuals entering the counseling profession remains predominantly White (S. P. Pack‐Brown, 1999). The authors define and explore the connection between White privilege and oppression and encourage the use of racial identity models to address these constructs with counselor trainees in supervision.     

Handwriting: Ergonomics, Assessment and Instruction

Handwriting is a skill which must be taught. The aim in teaching handwriting is for each child to develop a personal style which remains legible at speed. This objective requires the systematic teaching of handwriting. Teachers need to ascertain what are the important factors to consider when teaching handwriting and how to assess pupil performance. Chris Bailey reviews research on some of the factors affecting writing – pencil grip, finger pressure, writing implements and writing paper – and the literature relating to the assessment of legibility and speed. The author is headteacher of a primary school in the London Borough of Enfield.     

Assessment,Control, and Autonomy: Macroscopic Perspectives

Assessments such as ranking exercises arguably level the playing field for stakeholders. Quality assurance may remain a challenge for consumers, but ‘public’ assessments do provide a nominal element of independence or autonomy. This article outlines, from a German perspective, the way in which research assessments are frequently subject to influence from a variety of sources. It offers some developmental perspectives on assessment as an organic work‐in‐progress for the scientific and research community.     

Davis Street Magnet School: Linking Child Development With Literacy

The School Development Program Essentials of Literacy process uses a number of strategies to develop literacy among students who have been identified by their teachers as being "problem readers." At Davis Street Magnet School, this Comerian approach has worked not only to develop students' literacy skills but also to support and enhance their growth along six developmental pathways. This process also serves the important function of strengthening the connection between school and home.     

White on Autonomy, Neutrality and Well-Being

John White has recently defended a national curriculum which aims to promote children's well-being and personal autonomy. I argue that there is a sense in which the state can remain neutral between diirferent conceptions of the good life and that White has not established that the state should aim to promote particular conceptions. I contend that the arguments which White offers in defence of his view of well-being are inadequate and that he has failed to justifi the promotion of everyone's personal autonomy.