Globalizing Educational Accountabilities

Bob Lingard, Wayne Martino, Goli Rezai-Rashti, Sam Sellar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134640874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Globalizing Educational Accountabilities analyzes the influence that international and national testing and accountability regimes have on educational policy reform efforts in schooling systems around the world. Tracing the evolution of those regimes, with an emphasis on the OECD's PISA, it reveals the multiple effects of policy as numbers in countries with different types of government and different education systems. From the effect of Shanghai's PISA success on nations trying to compete economically to the perverse effects of linking funding to performance targets in Australia, the analysis links testing and accountability to new modes of network governance, new spatialities, and the significance of data infrastructures. This highly illustrative text offers scholars and policy makers a critical policy sociology framework for doing education policy analysis today.

1
Introduction

Introduction

What is counted affects what counts in schooling today and is central to how educational accountability is framed. Globally, but particularly in Anglo-American and Asian nations, testing of various kinds has become an instrument for steering schooling systems in particular directions using accountability regimes. Rizvi and Lingard (2010) have argued that what Bernstein (1971) called the evaluation message system of schooling, in the form of testing, now steers schooling systems as meta-policy, with significant implications for the work of schools and teachers (see Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013). Such steering through testing has had great effects on each of the three message systems described by Bernstein—pedagogies, curricula, and assessment—as well as upon student learning and experiences of schooling. This is in stark contrast to a recent recommendation by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; 2013a) that effective forms of educational accountabilities should limit negative effects on teacher practices and professionalism. Central to the evaluation message system is high-stakes testing, which has witnessed the rise of top-down accountabilities linked to test performance and their use to hold schools, principals, and teachers accountable for school and student outcomes. Such high-stakes testing is now operative in the form of large-scale assessments (LSAs) conducted at provincial, national, and international scales.

LSAs and related accountabilities must be seen as part of the contemporary phenomenon of “policy as numbers” (Ozga & Lingard, 2007; Ozga, 2009; Lingard, 2011) and the growing “datafication” of social life. Data are central to new modes of governance linked to, and imbricated in, new public management (NPM), network governance, and contemporary governmentalities. Rose (1999) provides a clear description of the phenomenon of policy as numbers and the functioning of metrics, statistics, databases, rankings, comparisons, and so on within these mundane technologies of governance:

Democratic mentalities of government prioritise and seek to produce a relationship between numerate citizens, numericised civic discourse and numerate evaluations of government. Democracy can operate as a technology of government to the extent that such a network of numbers can be composed and stabilized. In analyses of democracy, a focus on numbers is instructive for it helps us turn our eyes from grand texts of philosophy to the mundane practices of pedagogy, of accounting, of information and polling, and to the mundane knowledges and “grey sciences” that support them.

(Rose, 1999: 232)

This is not simply a new analytical demand on sociologists, but also a description of contemporary practices of social analysis beyond academia. The “grey sciences” come to the fore here in our era of politics and policy as managerialist incrementalism devoid of “big ideas,” but replete with “big data.” This is in the political context of what Lyotard (1984) has referred to as the death of meta-narratives. Data become central to structuring the system and keeping it operative.

Data-driven rationalities and technologies of governmentality are tied to a form of biopower mobilized through numbers as inscription devices (devices both constitute and target specific populations as a basis for identifying policy concerns); Rose (1988: 187) speaks about the role of numbers as a function of biopolitics that establishes both “a regime of visibility” and “a grid of codeability,” thereby constituting a navigable space of commensurability, equivalence, and comparison that renders the population amenable to administration, statistical mapping, and governance. The codes and grids of visibility produced by LSAs have disciplining and controlling effects for ranking and comparing education systems, which often incite politically motivated reforms within national systems. Often such incitement works through what has been called “externalization” (Bendix, 1978; Schriewer, 1990), rather than through policy learning, whereby poor national comparative performance on international tests is used to legitimize and strengthen politically driven domestic reform agendas (Sellar & Lingard, 2013a). Educational measurements, and the systems of accountability they enable, are thus an integral feature of the political technologies of governance “with their techniques for achieving subjugations of bodies” and the management or “control of populations” under the global panoptic gaze of other nations, systems, and capital itself (Foucault, 1998: 140).

There has been a specific global aspect to this emergence of policy as numbers and testing as systemic meta-policy. The development of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s (IEA’s) Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) has ushered in a new era of international LSAs. These programs now function as a mode of global educational accountability for national systems of schooling, complemented by national testing programs. There is a real articulation and symbiosis between national and international testing as part of the “respatialization” of educational politics and policymaking, linked to globalization (Amin, 2002) and the enhanced capacity for the “datafication” of schooling facilitated by advances in computational capacities. These interwoven global and national developments have given rise to what has been called the “the infrastructure of accountability” in education (Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, & Jacobsen, 2013).

The educational accountabilities we examine in this book are linked to changes in the functioning of contemporary capitalism globally, particularly the spread of information infrastructure (Bowker, Baker, Millerand, & Ribes, 2010) as a key technology for monitoring and managing education systems in connection with national economies. In this respect, Thrift (2005: 1) has argued that contemporary capitalism has begun “to consider its own practices on a continuous basis” through the collection and analysis of data by governments, nongovernment organizations, and private companies. Thrift calls this condition “knowing capitalism.” New information or data infrastructures associated with globalizing educational accountabilities are part of this phenomenon of capitalism seeking to know and modulate itself in order to sustain productivity and economic growth and to function more effectively and efficiently. We have entered a newly intensified phase of performative accountability in education (Lyotard, 1984; Ranson, 2003).

We see the “audit explosion” and the rise of “audit culture,” documented and analyzed by Power (1997), as part of the phenomenon of “knowing capitalism.” The proliferation of new sources and quantities of data produced by the everyday infrastructures of capitalism—the phenomenon of “big data” that is well-advanced in certain educational applications (Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013, 2014)—raises questions about the place and efficacy of an empirical sociology that has long valorized the collection and analysis of data through sample surveys and substantive in-depth interviews as its distinctive modus operandi and raison d’être (Savage & Burrows, 2007). In this context, Savage and Burrows suggest that contemporary sociology must renew itself through an agenda that focuses on analyzing and “challenging current practices in the collection, use, and deployment of social data” (896). Rose (1999), Hacking (1990), and Latour (1987) have also written about the complex classificatory and technical work that goes into the constitution of the numbers that both drive and create contemporary policy, and these arguments have relevance for policy sociology approaches to studying new modes of educational accountability. Examining practices of data collection, analysis, and representation, in relation to international and national testing and associated accountability regimes, is a central aim of this book.

We focus to a large extent on the educational assessment, testing, and accountability work of the OECD and the growth of its role in global governance (Woodward, 2009; Sellar & Lingard, 2013b, 2014). The OECD’s PISA and related testing developments (for example, the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies [PIAAC] and the Teaching and Learning International Survey [TALIS]) help to constitute the globe as a commensurate space of measurement, enabling comparative measures of the performance of schooling systems, individual schools, skills development, universities, and national stocks of “human capital.” We might see the success of this “commensurative work” (Espland, 2000) as reflecting the rise, or perhaps resurrection, of neopositivist epistemologies and ontologies (Lather, 2013) and a discourse of evidence-based policymaking (Luke, Green, & Kelly, 2010; Wiseman, 2010) that reframes the purposes and methods of educational research in new ways. As Luke and Hogan (2006) remind us, “the centrality of data and numbers to contemporary modes of governance mean that current debates over what counts as evidence in state policy formation are indeed debates over what counts as educational research” (170). However, given that policy is the “authoritative allocation of values” (Easton, 1953), and is constituted through an assemblage of research evidence, political values, and professional knowledges (Head, 2008), we can only really speak of “evidence-informed policy.” We might see new evidence-informed policy, data-driven rationalities, and big data analytics as “creating a new ontological ‘epoch’ as a new historical constellation of intelligibility” (Berry, 2011: 16) that requires new tools for critical sociological analysis.

The context of globalizing educational accountabilities is one in which social research is increasingly conducted beyond academia, and policymaking is increasingly being undertaken beyond the state and beyond the nation (Appadurai, 2001). Here we see the enhanced policy significance of both international organizations and edu-businesses. This book constitutes an engagement with these emergent intellectual, commercial, and policy spaces, evidenced in new imbrications of the local, national, and global, specifically as they relate to educational data and accountabilities. In the concluding chapter, we talk about the enhanced role of edu-businesses in policy work in education today. This development is reflected in the contribution to these methodological debates about new social data analytics by researchers attached to private companies (for example Boyd & Crawford, 2012). We might see these researchers as academic “boundary spanners” (Williams, 2002), working in interstitial spaces with policy analysts and other technical experts, such as secretariat staff at the OECD (described internally as a “non-academic university”), to focus on research for policy. In contrast, in this book we undertake research of policy (Gordon, Lewis, & Young, 1977), paying attention to the movement of policy actors involved in new modes of network governance, which work across national and global spaces and public and private sectors (see Ball & Junemann, 2012). As a consequence, Ball (2012: 93) suggests that policy analysis today must extend beyond the nation state and that such analysis should include international organizations, NGOs, and edu-businesses.

Throughout the book, we take a policy sociology in education approach (Ozga, 1987) to understanding the rise, functioning, and effects of globalizing educational accountabilities, new policy spaces, and network governance. Policy sociology draws on social science theories, methodologies, and data of various kinds, including interview data, document analysis, and historical work. In this book we engage with data from three government-funded research projects, two in Australia and one in Canada. The originality of the book lies in the utilization of these intellectual resources and their application to our topic, and we believe this extends the canon of work in policy sociology in education. The book might also be seen a response to the challenges Savage and Burrows (2007) have proffered to contemporary social sciences, both in terms of research topics and the intellectual resources, both theoretical and methodological, that are needed to understand data and society in our contemporary moment.

Globalizing Educational Accountabilities is then distinctive both in terms of its topic and the concepts that we bring to bear in our analyses. We see international comparative testing of the performance of schooling systems as constituting new spatialities of educational accountability, with effects on national policy production, the politics of education, and the work of systems, schools, principals, and teachers. To understand this new phenomenon, we draw on a range of intellectual resources derived from emergent theories within the social sciences. These “big ideas” include the related concepts of datafication, “big data,” and data infrastructures; new theorizing about post-Euclidean spatialities associated with what has been described as the “becoming-topological” of culture (Lury et al., 2012); and the emergence, post-NPM, of networked or heterarchical modes of governance in schooling, including the growing role of edu-businesses in education policy communities and processes (Ball, 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012; Au & Ferrare, 2015). Of course, the concept of accountability in education and its contemporary reworking is also central.

Contexts

Globalization has led to enhanced interconnectivity between nations and greater flows of people (including policy makers, politicians, researchers, academics, students) and policy ideas (knowledge economy, lifelong learning, human capital, accountabilities, testing) across the globe. Indeed, we might speak of global “policyscapes” in education (Ball, 1998). Sahlberg (2011) has written of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), which has spread through schooling systems around the world. This movement focuses on high-stakes testing, educational accountability, sometimes national curriculum (for example in England and Australia), an emphasis on literacy and numeracy (for example in Ontario and Australia), new managerialism, and marketizations and privatizations of various kinds (Ball & Youdell, 2008; Ball, 2008, 2012), including school choice policies and competition between schools as a putative means to drive up standards. We might more accurately speak of GERMS, given that the features of this reform movement always play out in vernacular ways within different nations and systems, mediated by local histories, politics, and cultures, leading to path dependency for policy in specific systems (Simola, Rinnie, Varjo, & Kauko, 2013; Takayama, 2015). When GERM reaches non-Anglo-American nations, we might also see it as an example of a “globalized localism” (de Sousa Santos, 2006); that is, the spread of an Anglo-American policy ideas globally.

Rizvi and Lingard (2010) have discussed the globalizing education policy discourses emanating from international organizations such as the OECD, World Bank, and UNESCO, which have helped to build convergence at the level of meta-policy discourses in education across nations. Stronach (2010), in this context, has spoken of global “hypernarratives” in education policy, a manifestation in a sense of GERM, which also push policy reform in national systems in particular directions. These are associated with a global respatialization of politics and political relations since the end of the Cold War and a reworking of the nation-state, including the strengthened influence of international organizations, new regionalisms, supranational bodies such as the EU, and so on. The latter have contributed to the creation of an emergent global education policy field (Lingard & Rawolle, 2011), associated with the emergence of global epistemic policy communities (Kallo, 2009) and related policy habitus (Lingard, Sellar, & Baroutsis, 2015), with effects in national schooling systems. In a sense, we see international testing and global accountability in education as helping to constitute the “global” in education, rather than simply being an effect of it (Sobe, 2015).

New educational accountabilities are one manifestation of this policy convergence at the meta-policy level. Novoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) have written of how the “global eye” and the “national eye” in education govern together today through complementary international and national testing regimes for schools. Comparing the performance of education systems has become a new mode of educational governance, which involves a global politics of mutual accountability and the translation of educational performance into an international “spectacle” (Novoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). The latter might be thought about in Foucauldian terms as a “global panopticism,” linked to what Lather (2013) has referred to as “metrics mania” in contemporary educational policy and research. This phenomenon is most evident in the references of politicians and policy makers to a global “education race,” which is made possible through international assessments and rankings of performance. What has come to count in education is how nations and systems are seen to perform in these rankings, rather than more substantive interrogations of the data generated by LSAs.

Based on our research on the OECD (Sellar & Lingard, 2013a, 2013b, 2014), we see global panopticism in education as coconstituted through value consensus among member nations and the Secretariat of the OECD, given the significant influence of PISA. We must remember that nations pay to participate in PISA and set the agenda for the OECD’s work. The OECD thus functions as a node in a network of complex relations between the Secretariat, OECD committees, experts, member nations, nonmember nations, policy discourses, data infrastructures, and commercial and nongovernmental organizations—in effect a complex, heterogeneous assemblage of administrative apparatuses. The resulting regulatory synergy needs to be understood in terms of the interweaving of multiple scales and spaces of governance and governmentalities: a policy “dispositif” (Foucault, 1980; Bailey, 2013) that cuts across these scales and spaces. For Foucault (1980), a dispositif is:

[A] thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, mores, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements.

(194)

We argue that the OECD’s work in education is helping to instantiate new modes of global governance in education, which we have characterized as epistemological and infrastructural governance, constituted and administered through new quantitative LSAs (Sellar & Lingard, 2013b, 2014). The OECD (2012) recognizes this in its approach to human capital assessment, arguing that any attempt to measure the skills of national labor forces requires the development of agreed definitions of skills and a metric that can be overlaid across the globe as a commensurate space of measurement. This is the technical work that Rose (1999) suggests goes into the mundane practices of policy as numbers. The concept of dispositif captures the complex assemblage of discursive and material elements in a policy network. We also recognize the need to historicize our analytical account of the emergence of global educational accountabilities and associated technologies of governance in the contemporary moment. This emergence is a response to the urgency felt within nations to compete in the global education race, especially after the global financial crisis and European sovereign debt crises, when knowledge capitalism has come to be considered the only game in the networked global village.

The nation-state and subnational political units work in different ways in this global context. Associated with the new individualism and self-responsibilization of neoliberalism, there has been a decline in consensus values underpinning policy. However, there has been a global circulation of policy discourses, which position policy makers in particular ways—this is the contemporary global education policy dispositif. In this setting, the rise of policy as numbers, both globally and nationally in education (Lingard, 2011), functions to keep schooling systems going according to a technical criterion of efficiency, which, set against the decline of meta-narratives, gives meaning to processes of policy production (Lyotard, 1984). As Lyotard observed decades ago, education systems are becoming increasingly performative and oriented towards achieving the best possible input/output equation. In education, with this rise of performativity, the question in schooling systems is “who controls the field of judgment” (Ball, 2003b). In answer to this question, we aver that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor Introduction Lois Weis
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Global Educational Accountabilities
• 3 Politics of Mutual Accountability
• 4 Catalyst Data
• 5 PISA and the Invisibility of Race
• 6 PISA and the Politics of “Failing Boys”
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index