Lawn, Martin (ed.) The Rise of Data in Education Systems: collection, visualisation and use. Comparative Histories of Education series. Oxford: Symposium books, 2013. 160p. (original) (raw)
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This book focuses on a major and highly significant development in the governing of education across the globe: the use of knowledge-based technologies to make policy, rather than simply as aids to decision-making. These technologies, we suggest, are themselves becoming the process of governing. A combination of factors has produced this shift. First, the massive expansion of technological capacity signalled by the arrival of 'big data' (McKinsey 2013) allows for the collection, circulation and processing of extensive system knowledge. The second factor is the growth of comparison as a basis for and justification of action. This growth is accompanied, inevitably, by the increasing displacement of contextualised, messy and 'local' understandings and meanings as resources for policy development, along with much of the ideological debate that previously fuelled a politics of education.
Quantitative sources for the history of education
History of Education
"This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of quantitative sources for the historian of education. It identifies and discusses key promises and challenges related to the construction and interpretation of historical statistics in education, drawing on a number of British and some French historiographical examples. Ultimately, the article encourages, where possible and appropriate, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to identify trends and patterns in education and facilitate their contextualisation in terms of processes and meanings."
This paper asks how educational accountability could possibly have become a core concept in educational policy within the 10 years after the Sputnik shock. This paper argues that this introduction included a Second World War and Cold War ideology of problem solving, the faith in experts and some skepticism towards democracy, and a considerable Trust in Numbers (Theodore Porter) combined with a “‘horse race’ mentality.” This article will reconstruct that first part of this transformation after Sputnik, that is, the rise of the new faith in experts, the rise of educational planners, and statistics. The thesis it demonstrates is that this process was possible mainly by a specific rhetoric that was developed as a core means of the change management. This rhetoric was able to level cultural and national differences, and this allowed these new ideals of educational governance to become accepted by the participants and thus to be implemented in their respective places. The example is the period leading up to 1965, when the individual member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had to take over the funding of educational programs that had previously been funded by the OECD (and that means it was funded to 50% by the United States). This ideology was transported and disseminated by a specific rhetoric that bypassed politically taboo themes and that covered up the clear strategies of governance. This paved the way for the process of standardization and the implementation of not only a formal adaptation of the organization of education but also, and in particular, specific ways of educational planning, such as statistics, and with them specific ideologies of how society and its citizens should be shaped. Only a few years later on, educational accountability had become a “normal” part in educational policy with a tendency to be treated as fetish. The thesis is demonstrated in five steps. First, the papers sheds some light on the broader ideological context of the early years of the OECD, that is, of its educational commitment as an expression of a highly educationalized Cold War culture. Then it focuses on the specific rhetoric developed in the think tanks and transnational organizations, settled in between science and politics, which includes the exclusion of taboo themes. Next to the analyses of the exclusion practices the rhetoric is identified as disguising, that is, suggesting help and support, but in fact creating coercing realities with hardly any way out. In the fourth step these rhetorical practices are being analyzed in one major project of the early OECD, with six Mediterranean countries at the center, in order to check in the final section the sustainability of the early efforts in educational planning after a fundamental revision of the OECD activities in 1964.
Towards a Sociology of Measurement in Education Policy
European Educational Research Journal, 2014
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the bases for significant, high-stakes policy and reform decisions. This article traces how international comparability is produced, using the example of equity measurement in OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It focuses on the construction of the objects of comparison and traces the struggles to produce equivalence and commensurability across diverse and complex worlds. Based on conversations with a number of measurement experts who are familiar with the OECD and PISA, the article details how comparability is achieved and how it falters and fails. In performing such an analysis, this research is not concerned with ‘exposing’ the limitations of comparison or challenging their validity. Rather, based on the work of Steve Woolgar and other scholars, it attempts to mobilise a ‘sociology of measurement’ that explores the instrumentalism and performativity of the technologies of international comparisons.
A Necropolis of Numbers': data production in Switzerland's decentralised education system
European Educational Research Journal, 2013
Since 1876 the educational landscape in Switzerland has been made up of more than 20 distinct education systems that are largely managed by the cantons themselves, with minimum interference from the federal state. However, approximately a century ago, Switzerland embarked on a policy of harmonisation, which draws on various data sources that are progressively shaped to serve this aim. Why are data important and what exactly are these data? Who needs, who collects and who shapes them? To what end? This article looks at the processes of collecting, comparing and shaping data through the journal published for close to 100 years by the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Public Education. This journal was the first to produce yearly statistics on Swiss education at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors compile and compare the two versions of the journal — one in German, the other in French — and focus on two periods which seem particularly relevant for the history of stat...
European Educational Research Journal, 11 (2), 189-205, 2012
This article is about the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its actors. It analyses the development and role of PISA as a ‘cultural product’ from the perspective of Bourdieu’s field theory. The authors attempt to answer the following questions: Of which field is PISA the product? In which field and by whom is PISA used and ‘consumed’? The authors argue that the development of PISA is part of a broader transformation of equilibria within the field of (education) knowledge – i.e. a move away from its autonomous pole towards its heteronomous pole. Such a move transforms the very form and shape of the field of knowledge: it has expanded and attracts a growing number of internal and external actors around its heteronomous pole. This (cor)responds to a transformation of the equilibrium within the general field of power, where the intellectual bourgeoisie (artists, professors, academics, writers) is increasingly subordinated to – indeed, sometimes working for – economic and political interests. The authors further argue that the incorporation of PISA at the level of education policy fields also transforms their form and shape in two main ways. Within policy fields, the diffusion and reception of PISA reinforces a heteronomous understanding of education which is defined mostly in terms of its contribution to external interests. The diffusion of PISA also extends and, in a sense, dissolves the very boundaries of (national) education policy fields. Specifically, the authors underline that such an internationalisation of the education policy fields progresses mainly at their heteronomous poles and through a heteronomous definition of education.
This article is about the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its actors. It analyses the development and role of PISA as a ‘cultural product’ from the perspective of Bourdieu’s field theory. The authors argue that the development of PISA is part of a broader transformation of equilibria within the field of (education) knowledge – i.e. a move away from its autonomous pole towards its heteronomous pole. Such a move transforms the very form and shape of the field of knowledge: it has expanded and attracts a growing number of internal and external actors around its heteronomous pole. This (cor)responds to a transformation of the equilibrium within the general field of power, where the intellectual bourgeoisie is increasingly subordinated to – indeed, sometimes working for – economic and political interests. The authors further argue that the incorporation of PISA at the level of education policy fields also transforms their form and shape in two main ways. Within policy fields, the diffusion and reception of PISA reinforces a heteronomous understanding of education which is defined mostly in terms of its contribution to external interests. The diffusion of PISA also extends and, in a sense, dissolves the very boundaries of (national) education policy fields. Specifically, the authors underline that such an internationalisation of the education policy fields progresses mainly at their heteronomous poles and through a heteronomous definition of education.
The Politics of Metrics in Education: A Contribution to the History of the Present
Normand R. (2020) The Politics of Metrics in Education: A Contribution to the History of the Present. In: Fan G., Popkewitz T. (eds) Handbook of Education Policy Studies. Springer, Singapore, 2020
Policy instruments are linked to the development of new modes of governance. They provide cognitive and normative frameworks for policy-makers to advocate changes, to implement new programmes, and to create new types of public interventions (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007). They contribute to the transformation of the State through the invention of new tools and devices, particularly metrics, which give legitimation to political aims, values, and ideologies. It corresponds to New Public Management which pretends reinventing tools of government and overcoming bureaucracy sometimes by reusing recipes from the past (Hood 1986). The instruments participate also in a kind of depoliticization and re-politicization of decision-making whereas policy-makers face many contestations and oppositions from different interest groups. As Michel Foucault demonstrated, these technical procedures of power and instrumentation are central to the art of governing and the development of a rationalizing State (Foucault 1977). Governmentality is not only based on measuring devices but also on intellectual and scientific technics, ways of thinking, epistemologies which become operational through metrics (Miller and Rose 2008). New relationships are established between science, expertise and politics that impact on the ownership, selectivity and choices of tools and instruments.
Paedagogica Historica, 2021
The Standing Working Group (SWG) “Observatory for the History of Education” was formed in the city of Porto (Portugal) during the ¨International Standing Conference for the History of Education¨ (ISCHE) in July 2019. Its essential purpose is to understand and reflect on the current theories and issues that are emerging from this field of knowledge during challenging times of the transition from the 20th to the 21st Century. In addition, more than a dose of uncertainty has been caught from the COVID-19 pandemic and affected our thinking about the meaning of history and life cycles. For, as we are duty-bound to admit, ¨time is the lord of history¨. This text seeks to set out the guiding principles of this observatory and open up new avenues of reflection in the context of the current pandemic.