The power of assessments and education reforms

• In Event: Global Education Reforms: Discursive Trends and Policy Impact, 1960-2020

Proposal

Numerical indicators to monitor and assess government performance have become an increasingly salient feature of international relations (Kelley & Simmons, 2015). These indicators can influence state behavior by triggering status competition at the regional or international level, catalyzing domestic political activism, or encouraging international pressures from intergovernmental or nongovernmental organizations (Kelley & Simmons, 2020). By virtue of comparison, countries engage in acts of mimicking and policy borrowing at a global scale in order to institute changes that reflect their national political needs (Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2018). In this study, I seek to understand how global education indicators and metric affect national education reforms and policies globally and nationally. To do so, I construct a new database of international (year of participation and measurements of quality using the Harmonized Learning Outcomes database), national assessments, and education reform measures with a particular focus on quality improvements from the World Education Reform Database (WERD). The paper will demonstrate the association between assessments and education reforms and discussion implications of this research on education policy directions.

Author

• Rie Kijima, University of Toronto