The Cultural Inscription of Numbers: The Gray Zone in International Comparison of School Result Research and Policy Making

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

Abstract

This paper examines “the grey-zone” in international assessments of student performance (Authors, 2015). In the past decades, new agencies have emerged to interpret the international school system results and make recommendations and specific national proposals for educational improvement. These agencies operate in grey-zone, spaces where actors contribute and mediate how the international assessments are to be interpreted and recommendations made about changing educational systems. Operating below the formal radar normally examined when looking at research outputs or policy arenas, the grey-zone does not operate by the canons of research communities, nor do they directly bear the same responsibility as policy makers and elected officials. However, it performs as a governing process through organizing principles that serve to delineate the problems of education through its “needs” - statements about educational systems and the targets of its change.
The locating of this site is important for understanding how theories and abstractions of the social (and education) sciences “act” to mobilize what constitutes social problems and methods of change. The discussion explores the system of reason that orders and classifies the reports of two agencies that operate in this grey-zone. One is the McKinsey & Company that publishes reports on how educational systems can improve in relation to PISA results and labor market preparation of youth. The other is OECD, the producer of PISA that conducts national policy reviews that draw on its measurement results to make recommendations for national system improvements. OECD’s analysis of the conditions of Swedish education and the McKinsey-reports provide entrance to a style of thinking and acting that moves among different institutions and social actors, such as policy discourses and discussions among teachers’ unions and public debates in Sweden.
The grey-zone area in which the reports operate, then, is more than mediating schemas between research and policy. Their scrutiny provide insight into how numbers are constituted as cultural practices about how to make judgments, to recognize types of objects, and draw conclusions in making manageable fields of existence that are never merely that of numbers. The seemingly technical appearances of the numbers enter into cultural realms that are never merely numbers but codifications and standardization of what are to constitute reality and planning. Numbers operate as road maps and 'highways' to the desired future and who is not desired– not only of school but of the family and society. The political of the standards of school assessment are how the statement of outcomes or performance indicators of assessment produce human kinds and differences that exclude and abject in the name of political and social participation.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin