From crisis to calculations: Proxies for learning in the Global South

• In Event: Interrogating the politics of data and measurement regimes in international education

Proposal

Following the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, there has been a gradual shift in focus from access towards quality within global efforts to improve education systems in nations classified as the ‘Global South’. Amid increasing desires of creating infrastructures of data to uphold accountability and inform decisions, several key actors - notably global institutions and philanthropic private organizations - have allied in their attempts to define and monitor ‘learning’ in these contexts. As a result, learning has been formulated in ways that are claimed to be easy to understand, universal, and conveniently quantifiable. Focusing on two such quantitative proxies for learning in the Global South - Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) and the Learning Poverty Indicator (LPI) - this paper closely examines their emergence and critically questions their self-evidence in the field of comparative and international education.

This paper is theoretically grounded in scholarship from three conceptual areas - the sociology of quantification, anthropological studies of ‘development’ in the global context, and critical studies of economic rationalization in the education sector. Drawing on Escobar’s (2011) critical examination of discourses of development in the modern world and Desrosières’s (2010) theorization of how statistics are deployed to represent social crises, this paper sees FLN and LPI as ideas that emerged within specific social, political, and economic contexts.

As part of a larger critical study of education policy shaped by global institutions and private philanthropies, the empirical inquiry in this paper entails historical and archival research. Primary data sources include websites, policy briefs, meeting proceedings, research reports, media publications, and other documents drafted by influential global institutions like the World Bank as well as philanthropic bodies like the Gates Foundation. Secondary sources range from the mass media coverage of education in various nations of the Global South to existing academic research conducted in those educational contexts. This analysis of the data was carried out using a methodological approach informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the social construction of technology (Pinch and Bijker, 1987).

Findings reveal how the prioritization of these proxies for learning is not due to their cognitive or pedagogical value, but due to their particular characteristics which suit modern-day measurement systems in global education - simplicity, quick to assess, acontextual, and quantifiability. Additionally, this paper’s analysis demonstrates how these proxies are closely tied to crisis narratives in education in the Global South. Their specific formulation and calculability makes it easier for external actors to demonstrate ‘learning crises’ in various national contexts, in ways that enable them to intervene as experts and thus, drive specific economic agendas.

Through this analysis, this paper contributes to existing literature in critical data studies and critical policy evaluation in education, and raises questions about the politics of data and measurement in international education. Within a discussion of how the current formulation of these proxies have detrimental effects on learning, implications for both research and policy are identified.

Author

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University