Abstract
The proliferation of standardized testing and administrative statistics in compulsory education is embedded in the rise to prominence of quantified accountability as a mechanism of education governance. Numbers work by stripping away the contexts of their production and the granular and ambiguous detail of the phenomena they claim to represent. The article re-examines qualitative interviews collected during a completed international project that studied policies and practices of accountability reforms and quality evaluation in Russian school education to understand how actors involved in quantified accountability—from producers to users of large-scale assessments of learning outcomes and administrative statistical data—articulate measuring or being measured in a decontextualized manner. The article offers two theoretical contributions on the enactment of accountability policies. First, it shows the importance of analytical attention to the materiality of accountability policies, that is, their specifically numerical nature. Second, it proposes that the study of accountability enactment should address the question of how actors deal with the decontextualizing propensities of quantified accountability. I conclude that enactment of accountability is fuelled by quantified decontextualization and the diverse ways in which actors experience, make sense of and act upon it.
Highlights
Governance has become increasingly and more overtly techno-rational (Le Galès, 2016), and governance by numbers, which reduces “complex processes to simple numerical indicators and rankings for purposes of management and control” (Shore & Wright, 2015, p. 22), is a prominent characteristic of our times
I examine how actors involved in quantified accountability—from producers to users of large-scale assessments of learning outcomes and administrative statistical data in Russia— articulate measuring or being measured in a decontextualized manner
As one of the most prominent ways to perform accountability of public education, manifests how contemporary education governance has come to rely upon tools that function at a distance through numerical forms of knowledge production, assessment techniques and evaluation data. This development has, for instance, accelerated the proliferation of standardized testing of learning outcomes (Benavot & Tanner, 2007). Whether we describe this expansion of quantification as neoliberal governance (Fougner, 2008), New Public Management (Hood, 1991), audit culture (Shore & Wright, 2015; Strathern, 2000) or metric society (Mau, 2017), what all these have in common is that numbers are increasingly treated in a realist modality and are expected to enable and reconcile centralized accountability with decentralized action (Rottenburg & Engle Merry, 2015)
Summary
Governance has become increasingly and more overtly techno-rational (Le Galès, 2016), and governance by numbers, which reduces “complex processes to simple numerical indicators and rankings for purposes of management and control” (Shore & Wright, 2015, p. 22), is a prominent characteristic of our times. I am interested in how these actors discuss “reality”, that is, their personal or professional selves and contexts represented through numbers, and deal with the decontextualizing qualities of quantification. This perspective, anchored in actor-network theorizing (cf Fenwick & Edwards, 2011; Piattoeva, 2018), examines the heterogeneity and distributed nature of policy and the role of non-human actors in policy enactments It foregrounds the performative qualities of the materiality that makes up policy and argues that they afford the “recognition of certain entities and attributes while excluding others from the reckoning” The empirical section examines the research findings according to three narratives that depicted the data/ context problematique: (1) data objectivity, (2) data lacking in context and (3) data as misrepresentation, followed by a concluding section
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
