In the shadow of the Cold War: The origins of metrology in educational planning

• In Event: International Organizations, Interdependency and the Rise of Global Metrology

Proposal

Drawing on archival research and interviews, this paper traces the historical continuities between the educational planning fervour of the post-World War II era and the contemporary rise of global metrology. In the 1960s international organisations (IOs) such as the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank promoted educational planning based on input-output oriented manpower forecasting methods. Milestones of that period were the launch of the UNESCO-World Bank Cooperative Agreement in 1964, OECD’s Mediterranean Regional Project, and the creation of the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) in 1963. The establishment of the IIEP was to some extent a consequence of the turf struggles between the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank over the field of educational planning (Benveniste, 2007).
In the OEEC, the precursor of the OECD, planning was driven to a high degree by the push for productivity coming from the United States in the context of the Marshall Plan (Elfert, 2020). The World Bank, which started giving educational loans in 1962, collaborated with UNESCO, which at the time had the greatest expertise in education in developing countries. Gradually, the World Bank built its own staff and resources in educational planning, hiring many graduates of the new study programs on the economics of education, educational planning and comparative education at leading U.S. universities, such as Harvard and the University of Chicago. These programs were supported and funded by the big American foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, as universities were considered a key factor in strengthening education as “a major ingredient of U.S. foreign relations” (Coombs, 1961).
The intersections and entanglements between the U.S. government, philanthropic foundations, universities and IOs are reflected in the career of Philip Coombs, the Ford Foundation’s education director who in 1963 became the first director of the IIEP after having held the position of the first Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs in the Kennedy administration. Coombs was instrumental in funding initiatives by the RAND Corporation to apply systems analysis, which had been developed for military purposes, to the school system (Bürgi, 2016, p. 412). The pursuit of comparison, which was an inherent building block of planning and systems analysis, soon called for the development of comparable statistics and indicators.
I will argue in this paper that the origins of metrology lie in the Cold War, which constituted the breeding ground of comparative research and the rise of metrology. Following Scott (1998), the OECD’s PISA study could be interpreted as an aftermath of the high-modernist “social engineering schemes of the twentieth century” (p. 4), of which educa-tional planning was a prime example. Although we see a shift in planning from the national to the trans-national level, metrology can be traced back to the central problem of the legibility of society in modern statecraft.

Author

• Maren Elfert, King's College London