Infrastructures and phantasmagrams of inclusions that exclude: international student assessments

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article is a diagnostic of how science ‘thinks’ as a mode of reasoning and space of action about inclusive education. Attention is given to the comparative reason generated in the Organization for Economic, Co-operation and Development’s (OECD)’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The infrastructure or architecture of the assessment is an exemplar of a science designed to provide practical knowledge for producing inclusive educational systems. Examined is the grid of calculative practices as producing patterns of recognition and expectations of experience that compare and differentiate nations, societies, and people. The calculations, however, are not merely descriptive. They embody desires as normative inscriptions of who students are, should be, and the dangerous populations threatening the imagined future. The calculations are likened to the seventeenth century projection machines of the magic lanterns, phantasmagrams of an inclusive education that distributes differences that exclude and abject. The comparing of people appears as non-polemical benchmarks, competences, literacies, and well-being organised as ‘highways’ of data to activate in policy and professional practices. The study of PISA is not a critique of science, per se; but of the historical impracticality of an infrastructure that reinscribes inequalities as its method to correct social wrongs.