PISA, Tiger Parenting and Private Coaching: The discursive construction of 'the Asian' in the globalised education policy field

Abstract

This chapter examines the social construction of 'race' in the increasingly globalised context of education policy making. In particular it focuses on how 'the Asian' as a racial construct is generated in the globalised education policy field where 'the ideology of a culturally indifferent world of education' predominates (Trohler, 2013, p. 158) and where given educational policies and programmes are transnationally circulated as 'silver bullets'. More specifically, the chapter examines the particular articulation of the Asian in the deterritorialised education policy discourse generated out of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD)'s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). OECD has come to powerfully influence education policy making on a global scale, and PISA has become its central policy lever. As it gains more global traction in education policy circles, an impressive volume of critical scholarship has been produced scrutinising its global reach, methodological limitations and underpinning ideology and worldview (e.g., Meyer & Benavot, 2013). And yet little effort has been made to critically assess PISA and its implications through the explicit lens of 'race', how it produces racialising discourses about particular minoritised groups and by extension the discourse of Whiteness.