ABSTRACT
Prior to the advent of international standardized assessments, such as the Program in International Student Assessment [PISA], the Canadian province of Nova Scotia developed antiracist education policy and programs based on local research. In 1994, the Black Learners Advisory Committee (BLAC, 1994) produced a three-volume series of historical and scholarly research, outlining the cultural and historical connections between the education system and experiences of institutional and systemic racism, in turn providing recommendations for redress for African Nova Scotian communities. After the first round of PISA testing in 2000, however, Nova Scotia slowly dis-articulated its education reform plan from antiracist and racial equity policy discourses, into neoliberal policies based on student and teacher performance, accountability, and standardized testing. The reliance on such performance and testing data has focused on individualized student outcomes, dislocated from larger discussions of race, ethnicity, and economic inequality. Yet, as Volante and Fazio (2018) argue, there is a growing concern that adherence to standardized models of education have “influenced equity discourse around the world” (p. 9), moving away from locally developed policies which emerged from complex historical, cultural, and political communities of practice, into a race-less discourse of testing and student performance based on “achievement gaps.” Using a policy genealogy from 1994–2016, this chapter traces discursive shifts in Nova Scotia education policy to demonstrate how policy discourses both respond to and recreate global neoliberal trends in local contexts. In this shift, antiracist policies become displaced by neoliberal discourses, in effect, “whiting out” race in the process.
