Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
9-2018
Abstract
This paper offers insights into the referencing of Singapore within the US Obama Administration educational discourse, underscoring the political-material-discursive nexus of international educational benchmarking. Using critical discourse analysis, we find that an objectified Singapore functions as a rhetorical tool of US policymaker agendas, with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and other international assessments as basis for truth statements. US policy discourses on Singapore’s education system perpetuate, rather than interrogate, PISA’s questionable underlying “truths” around socio-economic development, equity, and excellence, and thus on student achievement and underachievement. Singapore’s status as an “Asian Tiger” reference society intertwines with international assessments to form part of an emerging transnational regime of truth, homogenizing what to consider as factual or important, holding sway over views of reality by obscuring other more robust data, research, and lived experiences. In the process of constructing “high performance” around the role education plays in the international economic system, the notion of “low performance” is also discursively constituted and a schemata established for the disciplining of “low performing” bodies through neoliberal policy agendas.
Keywords
Underachievement, PISA, Singapore education, US educational policies, discourse analysis, neoliberalism
Discipline
Asian Studies | Education
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Asia Pacific Journal of Education
Volume
38
Issue
3
First Page
303
Last Page
318
ISSN
0218-8791
Identifier
10.1080/02188791.2018.1505600
Publisher
Asia Pacific Journal of Education
Embargo Period
3-30-2021
Citation
DE ROOCK, Roberto Santiago, & ESPENA, Darlene Machell.(2018). Constructing underachievement: The discursive life of Singapore in US federal education policy. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 38(3), 303-318.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3287
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2018.1505600