Datafication in education reform

• In Event: Data for accountability in education: Global trends in school reform

Proposal

Power and politics have always been central to policy making; in contrast, science has an uncertain and rapidly evolving role. Scientific authority did not become globally institutionalized as a routine dimension of policymaking until the years following World War II as part of the emergence of a global liberal order (Drori 1997; Thomas 2015). This paper explores the rise and evolution of scientized visions of policy by tracking education reforms related to data, information, measurement, and evaluation in a database of approximately 12,000 education reforms from 219 countries and territories over the period 1960-2019. It shows changes in scientized policy making by drawing on data of quantitative counts of reforms of various types over time and a qualitative analysis of the nature of these policies over time. The findings challenge conventional wisdom that today’s applications of data and information are an extension or deepening of earlier liberal and neoliberal reforms. Instead, the analyses show that scientized reforms used to be part of a package of inter-related liberal and neoliberal reforms, but today they have become delinked. The disconnection of scientized approaches from other dimensions of liberal models of education constitutes a new era in the relationship between science and policy making, more aptly described as “datafication” (Bradbury & Roberts-Holmes 2017), “new public analytics” (Yeung 2023), or “digital governance” (Dunleavy 2006).

Author

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University