Session Information
23 SES 02 C, Education, Social Inequalities and Gender
Paper Session
Contribution
Concern about the crisis of ‘failing boys’, or what Titus (2004) identifies as ‘boy trouble’, has persisted since the early 90s in countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe. Kloss (2011) for example, in citing recent PISA results, claims that Europe’s boys are 'wet behind the ears' in that they easily fall behind girls in their understanding of writing and speaking, without exception, in every member country of the OECD. Both in Europe and elsewhere, boys continue to be identified in these terms as the ‘new disadvantaged’ with their underachievement or failure being pitted against the educational success of girls (Lingard & Douglas, 1999; Ringrose, 2007; Skelton & Francis, 2009). In this paper we challenge the notion of ‘failing boys’ by drawing on both literature in the field pertaining to the achievement gap in urban schools and our own research with Portuguese students in urban schools in Toronto who have been identified as having the highest drop rate. Such research and critical analysis is important, we argue, given the persistence of a policy discourse which refuses to engage with key literature in the field and which points to the need to disaggregate performance data on the basis of race, ethnicity and social class. The problem is that “issues of race/ethnicity have been subject to a pernicious turn in policy discourse” and, hence, eclipsed by competing concerns about underachieving boys (Archer & Francis, 2007: 24). The result has been a failure to address how other factors, such as social class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, geographical location intersect with gender in significant ways to impact on specific groups of boys and specific groups of girls in terms of their achievement. Such research is important given the Ontario context where the Ministry of Education has officially launched an equity policy which identifies boys as a disadvantaged group alongside minority students, students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and students with special learning needs. In this sense our research needs to be understood within the neoliberal context of the politics of policy making in the specific Ontario context in terms of how equity is conceptualized. However, the specific Ontario case in terms of both our critique of policy making practices and our research with Portuguese students in Toronto, is positioned to further contribute to an understanding of the polemics of ‘failing boys’ within the broader context of the impact of neoliberalism and globalization across Europe and other parts of the world, including Australia and the United States. We draw on theoretical frameworks generated from within critical policy studies (Ball, 2008; Rizvi and Lingard, 2010) and by critical feminist and anti-racist scholars (Britzman, 1993; Archer & Francis, 2007; Hall, 1992) to highlight (i) the limitations of relying on the singularity of gender as an explanatory framework for making sense of the achievement gap; (ii) the extent to which a prevailing policy logic in Ontario context and also in Europe is driven by a neoliberal form of accountability and the consequences of this for addressing the achievement gap.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Archer, L. & Francis, B. (2007) Understanding minority ethnic achievement: Race, gender, class and ‘success’. London: Routledge. Ball, S. 2008. The education debate. Bristol: The Policy Press. Britzman, D. (1993) Beyond rolling models: Gender and multicultural education. In S.K. Biklen & D. Pollard (Eds.), Gender and education (pp. 25-42). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dyson, A. & Genishi, C. (2005) On the case. New York: Teachers’ College Press. Epstein, D. Elwood, J. Hey, V. & Maw, J. (Eds.) (1998) Failing Boys?: Issues in Gender and Achievement. Buckingham: Open University Press. . Francis, B. (2006) Heroes or zeroeos? The discursive positioning of ‘underachieving boys’ in English Neo-Liberal educational policy, Journal of Educational Policy. 21 (2), pp. 187-200. Griffin, C. (2000) Discourses of crisis and loss: Analysing the ‘boys’ underachievement’ debate, Journal of Youth Studies 3 (2), pp. 167-188. Hall, S. (1992). New ethnicities. In J. Donald & A. Rattansi (Eds.), ‘Race’, culture and difference (pp. 252-259). London, Newbury Park and New Delhi: Sage. Kloss, K. (2011) PISA study 2009: Europe’s boys ‘wet behind the ears’, The European Magazine. Accessed January 12, 2011: http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/article/36212/pisa-study-2009-european-idioms-weak-performance.html Lingard, B and Douglas, P. (1999) Men engaging feminisms: Profeminism, backlashes and schooling. Buckingham, Open University Press. Martino, W. & Meyenn, B. (Eds.) (2001) What about the boys? Issues of masculinity in schools. Buckingham: Open University Press. Patton, M. (2002) Qualitative research and evaluation methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Ringrose, J. (2007) Successful girls? Complicating post-feminist, neoliberal discourses of educational achievement and gender equality, Gender and Education 19 (4), pp. 471-489. Rizvi, F., and B. Lingard. 2010. Globalizing education policy. London & New York: Routledge. Skelton, C. & Francis, B. (2009) Feminism and ‘the schooling scandal’. London: Routledge. Titus, J. (2004) Boy trouble: rhetorical framing of boys’ underachievement, Discourse 25 (2), pp. 145-169.
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