The turbulence of statistics in education – A historical view of UNESCO-OECD relations, 1960-2000

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

Proposal

Some of the most important agents in terms of shaping a global education space in the 21st century are the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As argued by several authors, quantification and metrology in the shape of data, numbers and statistics stand central in the modes of governance in global education today (e.g. Addey 2018; Grek 2009; Nordin & Sundberg 2014; Ozga 2011). The main argument is that the selected variables, underlying assumptions, concepts, categories, logarithms and modes of counting, constituting the backbone of seemingly objective education data, form a governing complex with the power of setting standards for what education is in general and what good education is in particular.
Historically, the forming of this governing complex has been the subject of both collaboration and struggles between various agents. Drawing on a database of historical documents collected in the UNESCO and OECD archives in Paris as well as the Australian and U.S. national archives, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the negotiations, resistances, inertias and modifications in evidence in the UNESCO-OECD relations in terms of education statistics in order to shed light on the trajectories and backgrounds of the contemporary education landscape.
Theoretically, the paper draws on sociology of numbers, organisational sociology and the transnational turn in history of education (Berten and Leisering 2017; Borer and Lawn 2013; Cardoso and Steiner Khamsi 2017). The paper features three analytical layers: The geopolitical context, the shifting purposes of education statistics, and organizational changes and rivalries.
The paper covers some four decades going back to the early 1960s when the formation of the OECD first challenged the position of UNESCO in education and ending its coverage by the time of the launch of the first PISA round (Cusso 2006; Heynemann 2012).

Author

• Christian Ydesen, Aalborg University