The Struggle to Standardize: Assembling the International Standard Classification of Education

• In Event: Numbers, Education, and the Making of Society: International Assessments and Their Expertise

Abstract

International comparative mapping of literacy and numeracy has become a global feature of contemporary education, embraced by high and low income nations alike. Surveys such as PISA as well as literacy assessments used to monitor the progress of nations towards such targets as Education for All are now very widely used. This paper follows the development of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), which was first formulated by UNESCO in 1978 and is still in use, underpinning all the major education surveys.
Objectives: The objective of this study is to open up the black box of international classifications and to demonstrate that far from being self-evident and a technical matter, such classifications require extensive negotiation, good-will, resources and compromise, and produce social orderings with significant consequences. The paper aims to invite an understanding of classification as not merely a technical endeavor, but a political one, and to open up interdisciplinary conversations on the ontological politics of such work.
Theoretical framework: This paper adopts a material semiotic approach (Law, 2008), and uses resources from the sociology of measurement and numbers (Woolgar, 1991; Derksen, 2000) and Science and Technology Studies. Understanding ISCED as an assemblage of heterogeneous actors (Latour, 2005), it opens up the black box of standardization and explores how such classifications are assembled and stabilized, and the work and resources that go into maintaining them in a constantly changing environment.
Mode of inquiry: This is a historical case-study based on published first hand accounts of those involved in developing and revising ISCED.
Data sources: This inquiry is based on published first hand accounts of experts at UNESCO, OECD and the World Bank, which, in turn, were based, in addition to their own experience, on such historical records as committee meetings and conference proceedings.
Results: The study substantiates the following arguments: first, that ‘objective measurement’ is a performative practice rather than a representational one; second, that far from being neutral and unconcerned with the normative, this type of measurement is deeply political and involves normative judgments; and finally that, given the authority assigned to statistical data in policy making today, it is important to recover for statisticians the moral responsibility that is effaced by the myth of statistics as a merely a ‘technical’ activity.
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study: This paper demonstrates how adopting a material-semiotic approach promoted by a sociology of measurement can lead to new insights about standardization in education, afford new possibilities for critique, and provide novel ways to ‘interfere’ in such projects. It draws statisticians into interdisciplinary discussions that go beyond understanding their practices as merely technical endeavours, and to recover the sense of moral responsibility that is facilitated when statistical work is understood as ontological politics.

Author

• Radhika Gorur, Deakin University