Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
(T. S. Eliot, The Rock 1960).
… a layman’s version of the de facto impossibility of ever achieving a complete measure of any given system is provided in a note by Borges. An emperor wishes to have a perfectly accurate map of the empire made. The project leads the country to ruin—the entire population devotes all of its time to cartography.
(Lyotard 1984, p. 55).
Abstract
This paper provides an account and a critique of the rise of the contemporary policy as numbers phenomenon and considers its effects on policy and for educational research. Policy as numbers is located within the literatures on numbers in politics and the statistics/state relationship and, while recognising the longevity of the latter relationship, it is argued that the governance turn and neo-liberalism have strengthened the role of numbers in contemporary education policy. This phenomenon is situated in the contemporary ‘structure of feeling’, which sees politics reduced to managing the everyday and the evisceration of a progressive imaginary. The paper then documents the impact within education, focusing both on the emergent global education policy field and on the national agenda in Australian schooling and the related rise of ‘gap talk’, both globally and nationally. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications for educational research, suggesting that we as educational researchers are also being positioned by policy as numbers.
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Notes
Anderson (1991) argues that universal literacy, a function of the mass systems of elementary schooling created in the nineteenth century, was central to creating the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. I would argue that mass numeracy was also central to this creation.
This was perhaps the best way of encapsulating Australia’s PISA performance in 2000; subsequent performance has been best exemplified as high quality and mid-range equity.
I acknowledge that NAPLAN is a not a classic high-stakes test in that its effects are most directly felt by educational bureaucrats, principals and teachers, rather than with direct consequences for those who sit the test, but I would argue that such effects are deflected down the line onto students as well.
Some of this section on gap talk draws on the work of my doctoral students, Greg Vass and Sue Creagh, which deals with such talk and its effects in relation to Indigenous students and LBOTE students respectively.
My PhD student Faridah Awang alerted me to this plan and its ‘gap talk’.
There is some suggestion in the global education policy community that Korea’s enhanced performance on PISA has been a result of policy directed explicitly at improving test scores—a national teaching to the test approach, perhaps.
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This paper was delivered as the Radford Memorial Lecture at the 2010 Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education. I would like to thank my colleagues Sam Sellar, Ian Hardy, Greg Vass, Stephen Heimans, Sue Creagh, Aspa Baroutsis, Fazal Rizvi and Shaun Rawolle for their various contributions to this paper, especially Sam with his assistance in editing and also Carolynn Lingard.
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Lingard, B. Policy as numbers: ac/counting for educational research. Aust. Educ. Res. 38, 355–382 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-011-0041-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-011-0041-9