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Constructing underachievement: the discursive life of Singapore in US federal education policy

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.