Ruling the Future: Historicizing Standardization in Transnational School Reforms

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Policy Analysis: From Resistance to Repair (Table 13)

Abstract

Highly standardized approaches to education—scripting processes of teaching and learning and surveilling teachers and students—are promoted as useful policy to address achievement gaps. This paper examines how calls for standardizing teaching and learning overlook the history of standards. Analyzing education research, policy, and reform targeting Kenya, the paper historicizes standards, highlighting an enduring relationship to civilizational theories of modernity that arrange differences in terms of psychological and sociological backwardness. It demonstrates how standardization does not simply translate practices from industry into classrooms but is also a strategy to govern particular people and places deemed “unruly.” Today’s efforts to promote economic development through standardization attempt to efface this history while reinscribing standards’ civilizing norms and values.

Author

• Christopher M. Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison