Interrogating the politics of data and measurement regimes in international education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In recent decades, global education actors have increasingly called for a crucial need to prioritize investments in the measurement, monitoring, and evaluation of educational outcomes. At the start of the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on achieving education for all, participants of the World Education Forum in Dakar outlined a Framework for Action which cited the desire to assure that measurable learning outcomes were achieved by all, particularly in areas of literacy, numeracy, and life skills. More recently, in 2015, the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) also advanced a prominent focus on measurement and data within education, justified by a seemingly higher need for accountability and comparability in the quest for educational quality. International education scholars have noted how the ‘measurement turn’ has been evidenced by growing trends of ‘datafication’ and the expansion of data-driven educational reforms and accountability systems.

The intensification of data and measurement regimes have rendered their statistical and calculatory practices as objective, scientific, and commonsensical - thereby often obscuring the social, political, and cultural conditions within which they emerge. Engaging with the recent trends in international education data, this panel attends to the contestations and negotiations that exist across burgeoning global data and measurement regimes. Leveraging diverse analytic approaches, the papers on this panel examine the various material, discursive, and affective forces that drive the proliferation of measurement investments and explore the politics of growing data and measurement infrastructures within global education. Drawing on a wide range of conceptual frameworks from the fields of anthropologies and sociologies of measurement and quantification, curriculum studies, feminist science studies, and affect theories, this panel brings together conversations about data and measurement in education from both global as well as specific national contexts.

Connected by a perspective that questions seemingly self-evident processes of measurement and datafication in international education, the four papers in this panel examine a range of topics. The first paper critically analyzes two popular quantitative proxies for learning in the nations of the ‘Global South’ - Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) and the World Bank’s Learning Poverty Indicator (LPI) - and shows how their measurement processes emerged in tandem with crisis narratives motivated by vested political and economic interests. The second paper examines the affects of anxieties and pleasures which circulate around efforts to design scalable, cost-effective, and adaptable life skills measurement tools, amid competing pressures towards both contextualization and standardization. The third paper illustrates the detrimental consequences of ritualistic datafication, through an empirical focus on India’s National Achievement Survey (NAS). The fourth paper examines how the figure of ‘the global teacher’ in global education reforms is made through data and how its associated conditions transform teaching into a set of classifiable, measurable, and comparable practices.

Collectively, the authors on this panel address several critical questions about data and measurement, aligned with one of the conference's sub-themes focusing on a critical reflection on the field of comparative and international education. Across the papers, the authors ask how abstract entities in education are made concrete and actionable through measurement and quantification. By who, for who, and for what purposes? Further, the authors consider for whom and what rationales are certain competencies championed and highlighted as in urgent need of measurement. How does power mediate processes of measurement and quantification, their form, methods, and purposes within and across national boundaries? On the whole, this panel seeks to open up several critical lines of inquiry which interrogate the ongoing intensification of data and measurement regimes in education.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Chairs

• Olivia M Casey, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• From crisis to calculations: Proxies for learning in the Global South - Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University

• To standardize or contextualize? Affective atmospheres of anxiety and pleasure in life skills measurement - Karishma Desai, Rutgers University; Olivia M Casey, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education

• The global teacher: Transforming teaching practices into scientific data - Christopher M Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin Madison; Ezequiel Gomez Caride, Universidad De San Andrés

Discussant

• Thomas S Popkewitz, Uinversity of Wisconsin-Madison