1st Edition
Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society The Expertise of International Assessments
International statistical comparisons of nations have become commonplace in the contemporary landscape of education policy and social science. This book discusses the emergence of these international comparisons as a particular style of reasoning about education, society and science. By examining how international educational assessments have come to dominate much of contemporary policymaking concerning school system performance, the authors provide concrete case studies highlighting the preeminent role of numbers in furthering neoliberal education reform. Demonstrating how numbers serve as ‘rationales’ to shape and fashion social issues, this text opens new avenues for thinking about institutional and epistemological factors that produce and shape educational policy, research and schooling in transnational contexts.
1. Thomas S. Popkewitz and Sverker Lindblad: Statistic Reasoning, Governing of Education and Social Inclusion and Exclusion
Section I: Numbers: A History of A Style of Reasoning
2. Theodore M. Porter: Politics by the number
3. Hans Krause Hansen and Anne Vestergard: Reflections on the politics of lists and their governing capacities: ‘Tax Havens’ and ‘Secrecy Jurisdictions’
4. Catarina Martins: Measuring National Development: Its Historical Emergence, The Cultures Of Objectivity And Making Up The Child Who Develops
5. Barbara Czarniawska: And the world has finally been made to measure
Section II: The Field of Making of Data: Problematics of Assessment in Context 11
6. Regula Bürgi and Daniel Tröhler: The development of the OECD education indicators in the 1960’s
7. Radhika Gorur: The struggle to standardize: Assembling the International Standard Classification.
8. Luis Miguel Carvalho: International Assessments and Its Expertise Fabricating expert knowledge for policy
9. David Berliner: The Implications of Understanding That PISA is Simply Another Standardized Achievement Test
Section III: Knowledge by the number – Large Scale Assessments and its field of communication
10. Sverker Lindblad, Daniel Pettersson and Thomas S. Pokewitz: A research review of large scale assessments in education and their social and intellectual organization
11. Miguel A. Pereira, Antonio Luzón and Mónica Torres: The scholarly reception of the OECD’s PISA and the social and media impact. A preliminary study
12. Daniel Pettersson and Christina Elde Mølstad: Who Governs the Numbers? The Framing of Educational Knowledge by TIMSS-research
13. OECD as a site of coproduction: European education governance and the new politics of ‘policy mobilization’
Section IV: The Dissolution of the Science/Society Distinction
14. Sverker Lindblad, Daniel Pettersson and Thomas S. Popkewitz: On the making of educational facts in the intersection of science and society.
15. Thomas S. Popkewitz: The Greyzone: The Cultural Inscription of Numbers: The Grey-Zone in International Comparison of School Result Research and Policy-Making
Biography
Sverker Lindblad is Professor of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Daniel Pettersson is Associate Professor at the University of Gävle and Uppsala University, Sweden.
Thomas S. Popkewitz is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.