World Yearbook of Education 2014

Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education

Tara Fenwick, Eric Mangez, Jenny Ozga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317814573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This latest volume in the World Yearbook of Education Series focuses on a major and highly significant development in the governing of education across the globe: the use of knowledge-based technologies as key policy sources. A combination of factors has produced this shift: first, the massive expansion of technological capacity signalled by the arrival of 'big data' that allows for the collection, circulation and processing of extensive system knowledge. The rise of data has been observed and discussed extensively, but its role in governing and the rise of comparison as a basis for action is now a determining practice in the field of education. Comparison provides the justification for 'modernising' policy in education, both in the developed and developing world, as national policy makers (selectively) seek templates of success from the high performers and demand solutions to apparent underperformance through the adoption of the policies favoured by the likes of Singapore, Finland and Korea.

In parallel, the growth of particular forms of expertise: the rise and rise of educational consultancy, the growth of private (for profit) involvement in provision of educational goods and services and the increasing consolidation of networks of influence in the promotion of 'best practice' are affecting policy decisions. Through these developments, the nature of knowledge is altered, along with the relationship between knowledge and politics. Knowledge in this context is co-constructed: it is not disciplinary knowledge, but knowledge that emerges in the sharing of experience.

This book provides a global snapshot of a changing educational world by giving detailed examples of a fundamental shift in the governing and practice of education learning by:

• Assessing approaches to the changing nature of comparative knowledge and information

• Tracking the translation and mobilisation of these knowledges in the governing of education/learning;

• Identification of the key experts and knowledge producers/circulators/translators and analysis of how best to understand their influence;

• Mapping of the global production of these knowledges in terms of their range and reach the interrelationships of actors and their effects in different national settings.

Drawing on material from around the world, the book brings together scholars from different backgrounds who provide a tapestry of examples of the global production and national reception and mediation of these knowledges and who show how change enters different national spaces and consider their effects in different national settings.

Part I

Governing by Comparison

1 Comparative Research in Education

A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?

António Nóvoa and Tali Yariv-Mashal

Introduction: Why the Regained Popularity of Comparative Research?

Disciplines are in their little world rather similar to nation-states, as their timing, size, boundaries and character are, of course, historically contingent. Both organisa tions tend to generate their founding and historical myths. Both claim contested sovereignty over a certain territory. Both fight wars of boundaries and secession. Both have elaborate mechanisms and procedures for the production of organisational identity and loyalty, and both are also undercut or transcended by cross-boundary identities and loyalties.

(Therborn 2000, p. 275)

The definitions, boundaries and configurations of the field of comparative education have changed and reshaped throughout the history of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influenced by the way in which educational policy has been conducted, as well as by distinct conceptions of knowledge. The formulation of educational knowledge – what is important to know and what should or should not be reflected in the study and practice of education – has historically been a consequence of social and political as well as academic developments. More than an epistemological discussion, these developments entail a process that is historically contingent, vulnerable and reflective of the political mood and intellectual space that they express.

In the past decade, it seems that there has been an important process of re-acceptance of the comparative perspective within various disciplines, among them within educational research. After being ostracised for several decades, comparative approaches are regaining their popularity, both as a method of inquiry and as a frame of analysis. It is a situation that has both positive and negative consequences: on the one hand, it can contribute to the reconstitution of a field of research that has been unable to distinguish itself as a sound intellectual project over the years; on the other hand, it can be regarded as a vague fashion, and thus disappear as suddenly as it appeared.

The renewed interest in comparative education is a consequence of a process of political reorganisation of the world space, calling into question educational systems that for centuries have been imagined on a national basis (Crossley 2002). In fact, developments in comparative education need to be placed within a larger framework of historical and societal transitions. This has been the case in the past and it is the case in the present. In attempting to determine specific times at which this field has gained legitimacy and popularity, a tentative chronology becomes apparent:

• 1880s: Knowing the ‘other’. At the end of the nineteenth century, the transfer and circulation of ideas, in relation to the worldwide diffusion of mass schooling, created a curiosity to know other countries and educational processes. International missions, the organisation of universal exhibitions and the production of international encyclopaedias, all led to the emergence of the discipline of comparative education, which was intended to help national reformers in their efforts to build national systems of education.

• 1920s: Understanding the ‘other’. World War I inspired an urgent sense of the necessity for international cooperation and mutual responsibility. Concomitant with this impulse was a desire to understand the ‘other’, both ‘other’ powers and ‘other’ countries, bringing with it an interest in different forms of knowledge production, schooling and education. To build a ‘new world’ meant, first of all, to educate a ‘new man’ which implied a ‘new school’. The need to compare naturally arose, concentrating on educational policies as well as on pedagogical movements.

• 1960s: Constructing the ‘other’. The post-colonial period witnessed a renewal of comparative approaches. The need to construct the ‘other’, namely in terms of building educational systems in the ‘new countries’, led to the dissemination of development policies, at a time when education was considered a main source of social and economic progress. The work accomplished within international agencies, as well as the presence and influence of a ‘scientific approach’ that was developed as the basis of comparative studies, created educational solutions that were exported to different countries and regions.

• 2000s: Measuring the ‘other’. In a world defined through a flux of communication and interdependent networks, the growing influence of comparative studies is linked to a global climate of intense economic competition and a growing belief in the key role of education in the endowment of marginal advantage. The major focus of much of this comparative research is inspired by a need to create international tools and comparative indicators to measure the ‘efficiency’ and the ‘quality’ of education.

By recognising these moments of transition it is possible to recognise the interrelation between comparative research and societal and political projects. This connection is visible in recent developments, as much as it was in historical processes of change – see, for example, the overview provided by Kazamias (2001) of the episteme of comparative education in the USA and England, providing yet another point of view of the history of the field.

Currently, we are witnessing a growing interest in comparative approaches. On the one hand, politicians are seeking ‘international educational indicators’, in order to build educational plans that are legitimised by a kind of ‘comparative global enterprise’. On the other hand, researchers are adopting ‘comparative methods’, in order to get additional resources and symbolic advantages (for instance, the case of the European Union where the ‘comparative criterion’ is a requisite for financing social research). The problem is that the term comparison is being mainly used as a flag of convenience, intended to attract international interest and money and to entail the need to assess national policies with reference to world scales and hierarchies. The result is a ‘soft comparison’ lacking any solid theoretical or methodological grounds.

Studies conducted and published by such organisations as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA/OECD) or the indicators set up to assess the Quality of School Education (European Union) illustrate well this construction of knowledge and policy. The significance of these organisations is immense, as their conclusions and recommendations tend to shape policy debates and to set discursive agendas, influencing educational policies around the world (Crossley 2002). Such researches produce a set of conclusions, definitions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ educational systems, and required solutions. Moreover, the mass media are keen to diffuse the results of these studies, in such a manner that reinforces a need for urgent decisions, following lines of action that seem undisputed and uncontested, largely due to the fact that they have been internationally asserted. In fact, as Nelly Stromquist (2000) argues, ‘the diffusion of ideas concerning school “efficiency”, “accountability”, and “quality control” – essentially Anglo-American constructs – are turning schools all over the world into poor copies of a romanticized view of private firms’ (p. 262).

The academic critique of these kinds of studies is well established:

Most recent of all, arguably, has been the advent of the language of performance indicators – the identification of explicit dimensions to represent ‘quality’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘success’ of education systems and of individual institutions within them. The growing internationalisation of this activity in recent years […] marks perhaps the most powerful and insidious development to date in the process of the world-domination of one particular educational model.

(Broadfoot 2000, p. 360)

Our intention is not to reiterate this intellectual and academic critique, but to insist on the importance of comparative approaches as a way to legitimise national policies on the basis of ‘international measures’. What counts is not so much the traditional ‘international argument’, but instead the circulation of languages that tend to impose as ‘evident’ and ‘natural’ specific solutions for educational problems. Curiously enough, education is regarded, simultaneously, through a ‘global eye’ and a ‘national eye’, because there is a widely held assumption that education is one of the few remaining institutions over which national governments still have effective powers (Kress 1996). It is important to acknowledge this paradox: the attention to global benchmarks and indicators serves to promote national policies in a field (education), that is, imagined as a place where national sovereignty can still be exercised.

It is not so much the question of cross-national comparisons, but the creation and ongoing re-creations of ‘global signifiers’ based on international competition and assessments. This, in turn, fosters specific comparative methodologies and theoretical frameworks that are useful for such analysis. In this never-ending process, questions regarding units of analysis and the influence of ‘international categories’ arise. What would be the cultural, societal, and even more so, political consequences of these global benchmarks? How can or should the academic research of education, and specifically the field of comparative education, foster such practices? What would all this eventually bring into the practice of educational planning? These questions all arise and become especially significant in the current flow of research and knowledge (Crossley 2002; Grant 2000).

Let us elaborate on the European situation to make this point more visible. In an official document of the European Union (EU Documents 2001a), The Concrete Future Objectives of Education and Training Systems, it is stated:

While we must preserve the differences of structure and system, which reflect the identities of the countries and regions of Europe, we must also recognize that our main objectives, and the results we all seek, are strikingly similar. We should build on those similarities to learn from each other, to share our successes and failures, and to use education together to advance European citizens and European society into the new millennium.

(p. 37)

In practice, since the mid-1980s, but particularly in recent years, the programmes and guidelines that have been implemented at the European level reflect the adoption of a ‘common language’ of education. New ways of thinking about education have been defined, carrying on governing principles that tended to impose ‘one single perspective’ and, consequently, tended to de-legitimise all alternative positions. Of course, no country will abdicate a rhetoric affirming its ‘national identity’. Yet, all European Union member states end up incorporating identical guidelines and discourses, all of which are presented as the only way to overcome educational and social problems. The strength of these guidelines resides in their acceptance by different countries with a ‘sense of inevitability’. In the upcoming years we will witness the deepening of this contradiction: national politicians will proclaim that education is the exclusive responsibility of each member state, even as they adopt common European programmes and policies (Nóvoa 2002).

The recent popularity of comparative education must be explained through this internationalisation of educational policies, leading to the diffusion of global patterns and flows of knowledge that are assumed to be applicable in various places. It is important to underline that these international indicators and benchmarks are not spontaneously generated. On the contrary, they are the result of policy-oriented educational and social research. In saying this, we come to the heart of this chapter. These current trends, as presented, create a unique occasion for comparative educational research that can either lead to the impoverishment of the field, reducing it to a ‘mode of governance’ or, on the contrary, can contribute to its intellectual renewal, through more sophisticated historical and theoretical references. These two possibilities will be analysed in the following sections.

Comparability as a Mode of Governance

Although the world is witnessing the emergence of new forms of political organisation, and a renewed attention is being paid to questions of how communities are imagined, it is clear that the political and societal form of the nation-state will not disappear in the near future, and the end of the era of nationalism is not remotely in sight (Anderson 1991). World relations tend to be defined through complex communication networks and languages that consolidate new powers and regulations. International criteria and comparative references are used as a reaction to the crisis of political legitimacy that is undermining democratic regimes around the world. The statement ‘We are all comparativists now’ illustrates a global trend, one that perceives comparison as a method that would find ‘evidence’ and hence legitimise political action. This perception of the political role of comparative research places the comparative approaches in a position that carries a responsibility, and consequently entails the production of policy decisions and actions by definitions of standards, outcomes and benchmarks.

The enthusiasm towards comparative research has two major consequences that we believe are crucial to the academic field of comparative education: the society of the ‘international’ spectacle and the politics of mutual accountability.

• The society of the ‘international’ spectacle. In conceptualising the idea of the ‘spectacle’ one should consider a societal sphere in which the definitions of reality, history, time and space are all transformed into a symbol. Even if there is no single core of control, the society of the spectacle ‘functions as if there were such a point of central control’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 323). In this societal sphere there is an excess of mirrors, creating the illusion of several images that, indeed, always reflect the same way of thinking. That is why ‘surveillance’ and ‘spectacle’ are not divergent positions. Surveillance is exercised through an exposure to public opinion, a spectacular display of indicators, ultimately serving to control individuals and performances. Spectacle is subject to rules of surveillance (surveys, audits, etc.) that define its own characteristics, creating an interpretative framework. According to Hardt and Negri, the spectacle ‘destroys any collective form of sociality and at the same time imposes a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of action and thought’ (2000, pp. 321–322). Politics is influenced, and in a certain sense constructed, through a systematic exposure to surveys, questionnaires and other means of data collection that would, or are perceived to have the ability to, estimate ‘public opinion’. This ongoing collection, production and publication of surveys leads to an ‘instant democracy’, a regime of urgency that provokes a permanent need for self-justification. Hagenbüchle (2001) rightly points out that ‘the mediatisation of political life reduces politics to a public spectacle’, impeding any critical discussion (p. 3). We argue that by using comparable measures and benchmarks as policy we are, in fact, creating an international spectacle, one that is deeply influencing the formation of new policies and conceptions of education.

• The politics of mutual accountability. The second important consequence relating to the changing roles of comparative research has to do with a politics of mutual accountability. Here, the exper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction
• Part I: Governing by Comparison
• Part II: Knowledge Technologies in Action
• Index