Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society

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.

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.

1. Getting the Numbers Right: An Introduction, Sverker Lindblad, Daniel Pettersson, and Thomas S. Popkewitz SECTION I Numbers: A History of a Style of Reasoning 2. Politics by the Numbers, Theodore M. Porter 3. On the Contest of Lists and Their Governing Capacities: How 'Tax Havens' Became 'Secrecy Jurisdictions', Hans Krause Hansen and Anne Vestergaard 4. Time, Drawing, Testing: The Making Up of the Developmental Child and the Measuring of the Nation's Development, Catarina S. Martins 5. And the World Has Finally Been Made to Measure, Barbara Czarniawska SECTION II The Field of Making of Data: Problematics of Assessment 6. Producing the 'Right Kind of People': The OECD Education Indicators in the 1960s, Regula Bürgi and Daniel Tröhler 7. Standards: Normative, Interpretative, and Performative, Radhika Gorur 8. International Assessments and Its Expertise Fabricating Expert Knowledge for Policy, Luis Miguel Carvalho 9. The Implications of Understanding That PISA Is Simply Another Standardized Achievement Test, David C. Berliner SECTION III Large-Scale Assessment as the Production of Numbers 10. PISA as a Social Media Event: Powering the 'Logics of Competition', Miguel A. Pereyra, Antonio Luzón, Mónica Torres, and Daniel Torres-Salinas 11. Who Governs the Numbers?: The Framing of Educational Knowledge by TIMSS Research, Christina Elde Mølstad and Daniel Pettersson 12. OECD as a Site of Coproduction: The European Education Governance and the New Politics of 'Policy Mobilization', Sotiria Grek SECTION IV The Dissolution of the Science/Society Distinction 13. Statistics Reasoning, Governing Education and Making Differences as Kinds of People, Thomas S. Popkewitz and Sverker Lindblad 14. Anticipating the Future Society: The Cultural Inscription of Numbers and International Large-Scale Assessment, Thomas S. Popkewitz