Data for accountability in education: Global trends in school reform

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The panel discusses how the current trend of using data for accountability purposes in education has gradually developed into a global script over a period of four decades. Starting with the sweeping reorganization of the education sector, first propelled by New Public Management and then followed by the school-autonomy-with-accountability reform movement, the use of new and more sophisticated forms of data (including performance data, growth indexes, predictors of student dropouts) has become pervasive and permeates every aspect of schooling. Even though the reasons for why governments bought into the global script and how they have translated performance-based accountability vary widely, the trend has had huge repercussions for each and every school system. The proliferation of standardized student assessments, impact evaluations of policy interventions, tracking systems of student behavior, and benchmarking are only some examples that illustrate the point. The authors share an interest in understanding this phenomenon from a comparative, historiographical, multilevel, and global perspective.

We are moving towards a post-neoliberal era. [Authors/presenters] and their associates convincingly demonstrate that the neoliberal reform furry, as evidenced in the large number of laws, amendments to laws, decrees and guidelines issued worldwide over the period 1989 – 2007, has slowed-down [Authors/presenters et al. 2023). Over the past fifty years, policies that emphasize access declined whereas policies that target quality improvement increased significantly (Overbey, 2023). The change was accompanied with a proliferation of standardized tests, excessive reporting in classrooms, schools and at all levels of administration, as well concerns for growing inequalities between schools. In some countries, the neoliberal reform also opened up the gates for the private sector and other non-state providers that have flooded the education sector at grand scale. At the same time, education has been discovered not only as a lucrative business by private actors but also as a popular trope by many international organizations, including those that traditionally operated in the economic or other sectors [Authors/Presenters, 2021).

The neoliberal reform movement in education can be best described as a school-autonomy-with-accountability reform ([Authors/presenters et al] 2019). In the first phase, this movement sought to fragment educational systems into autonomous providers through policies that promoted liberalization, choice, competition, rankings and privatization. Subsequently, the reinstatement of the interventionist state emerged as a means to limit the concept of autonomy and define the educational outcomes that schools should strive to achieve. This shift was supported and advanced by various political parties, including democratic ones. By the end of the period when the global agenda emphasized neoliberal and market solutions, a comprehensive package of school autonomy and accountability had been established. This is an opportune moment to look back and ask: how did we get here? Why did governments buy into the reforms and how have national policy actors translated and adapted them into their own education systems? Although research on policy transfer, policy borrowing, and policy mobility has a long tradition in comparative education, the panelists are dealing here with an issue that is far more complex than merely tracing traveling reforms across countries. We still need to dig deep into the "why" (policy reception) and "how" (policy translation) questions. Additionally, we must compare national school reform trends against a global script ([Authors/presenters et al., 2024]). What exactly the current global script and its variations entail in detail has become a matter of intense empirical and conceptual investigation, as presented in the panel.

The panelists bring together complementary disciplinary backgrounds, interpretive frameworks, and methods of inquiry in order to understand what the global script entails, what exactly travelled across national boundaries, and what varied effects it has had at the country level. The analyses afford to accurately assess what features of the global script have been institutionalized, that is, what survived twenty years after the peak of neoliberalism in education, and how the instrument of performance-based governance or datafication-with-accountability has continuously been expanded to include new thematic priorities, most recently the assessment of student wellbeing, The papers make the case for multiple research perspectives to understand the content, trajectories, and impact of global reform trends in education. They highlight what the panelists have in common and how their methods of inquiry and their theoretical frameworks complement each other. The authors share an understanding of the policy process that transcends national boundaries. They also take on a global perspective, covering both countries of the Global North as well as the Global South. Finally, the authors’ methods of inquiry are comparative in nature: they compare national developments across time, across countries, as well as against the global script.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Columbia University Teachers College & NORRAG

Chair

• Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University

Individual Presentations

• Datafication in education reform - Patricia Bromley, Stanford University

• School-Autonomy-with-Accountability: Cross-national configurations of a global policy model - Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Quality, assessments, and education reforms - Rie Kijima, University of Toronto

• Examining the universe of education intergovernmental organizations - Kerstin Martens, University of Bremen

• Comparing against a global script: Considerations of method and theory - Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Columbia University Teachers College & NORRAG