Technologies of Educational Governance

• In Event: Interrogating Governing Discourses in Early Childhood and Childhood Studies and Policies Through a Foucauldian Lens

Abstract

The standards movement of K-12 education in the USA is now extended to the early childhood education programs that serve 4 year old or younger children. Most states have developed child outcome standards that define general expectations for young children’s development and learning at a certain age. More importantly, concomitant with the increasing public investment in early childhood programs come various policies and reform efforts regarding documentation of systematic child outcome data to monitor the progress toward achieving those standards, both for individual children and for the program as a whole.
As data of various kinds at the children, teacher and program levels is an essential component of the control mechanism of contemporary audit society (Power, 1997), there is a need for the critical analysis of digital technologies in the field of education that facilitate its recording, storage, analysis and sharing. In this paper, drawing on the theoretical framework of governmentaility or analytics of government (Foucault, 1991), I focus on child data and assessment system as a site of interest to examine the emergence of “digital education governance” in the field of early childhood education and care (Williamson, 2015, p.1). Addressing current concerns and issues associated with the digital education governance, I also draw attention to what Ball and Junemann (2012) refer to as “network governance” where we have seen the increasing involvement of private interests, edu-business, and testing industry in the early childhood education. Particularly, Teaching Strategies Gold Online that uses a computer data system for online data entry, storage of observation notes, and analysis is a good case in point because of its growing popularity in the field of early childhood education. The Teaching Strategies Gold Online is currently consumed by more than half of all Head Start programs across the country (Isaacs et al., 2015). In addition, as of 2012, Teaching Strategies Gold Online has been the most common measure required to be used or approved for use by State funded Pre- Kindergarten programs (Schilder & Carolan, 2014).
The empirical part of this paper is based on a discourse analysis of various policy documents, reports, Teaching Strategies Gold Online related pamphlets, websites and other documents. These documents include those produced by various actors to “promote, justify, and naturalize” the use of technologies in the educational governance as well as those that provide “descriptions of the functional principles” of certain tools to “specify their technical operations (Williamson, 2015, p.2).

Author

• Koeun Kim, New Mexico State University