ABSTRACT
The school was criticized for neglecting the basics of good education and good school management, yet it was acknowledged that the school had a strong commitment to multicultural and anti-racist education. The construction of the tests or tasks raises issues of gender and race with regard to cultural and linguistic biases and also with regard to the types of activities singled out for assessment purposes. The test or task question strikes at the heart of the relationship between pedagogy and assessment. The view could be taken that such attacks on ‘multicultural’ pedagogy were inevitable because ethnocentric perspectives are part and parcel of the politics of the Right. The evident failure of the assimilationist and integrationist approaches contributed to the emergence within education of multicultural approaches which reflected the cultural pluralist position that marked the direction in which national policy appeared to be heading.
