Datafication as a Political Technology: Translating International Benchmarking in US Federal Education Discourses

• In Event: How Do STS Studies Translate Numbers: Economics, Markets Value/Valuation and Policy

Abstract

The examination, in its quantification of the child, has long been a fundamental technology in education (Foucault, 1979; Ozga, 2008). However, students (along with their teachers and communities) are increasingly subjected to numbers and rendered numbered subjects (Ball, 2015) through international educational benchmarking such as PISA, which has become an obligatory point of passage (OPP; Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007; Law, 1986) for educational policy-making (Carvalho, 2012). This paper analyzes US federal policymaker discourse on and data practices around international standardized assessments during the Obama Administration, focusing on Singapore and other high performing systems. While the general assumption (and expectation) is that educational policies and reform are steered by big data sets generated, processed, and authenticated by key global testing regimes, US educational policy makers are neither predominantly nor deliberately driven by data. In fact, the most salient of these (translational) data practices have very little to do with robust leveraging of the data itself, as they are devoid of intensive research practices or analyses. In establishing and perpetuating benchmarking as an OPP, policymakers translate (Callon, 1984) numbers and rankings into problems while reinforcing their authority (Asdal, 2011) to present inevitable (neoliberal) solutions; such doing of numbers (Espeland & Stevens, 2008) is always situated, traceable to the unfolding of translational processes (e.g. in attacks on teacher professionalism and unions). Data are mobilized to either justify or advance policy assemblages steered by neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 1991), particularly the ongoing shift from a so-called welfare state to a competition state (Cerny, 1990).

Authors

• Roberto de Roock, Nanyang Technological University

• Darlene Machell Espena, Nanyang Technological University