Politics, Policies and Pedagogies in Education

The selected works of Bob Lingard

Bob Lingard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415841450
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135019976
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the World Library of Educationalists, international experts compile career long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces of work – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field.

Bob Lingard has spent the last 30 years researching and writing in universities in Australia, England and Scotland about changing education policy issues. His work is written from a sociological perspective and with a commitment to social justice. He is the co-editor and co-author of 17 books and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.

In Politics, Policies and Pedagogies in Education, Bob Lingard provides critical sociological engagement with the politics of education. The focus is education policy and the impact of globalization, including epistemological and methodological issues necessary for researching education policy today. Topics analyzed include:

• educational restructuring
• new accountabilities and testing
• mediatization of education policy
• policy as numbers
• the global policy field and policy borrowing
• pedagogies.

Lingard also considers the nature of educational research today. He has selected 12 of his key writings and in a critical introduction situates and contextualizes the work against key developments in the field and in the changing world.

CHAPTER 1

POLICY AS NUMBERS

Ac/counting for educational research

Lingard Bob

Originally published in: Australian Educational Researcher, 2011, 38(4): 355–382¹

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)

Introduction

This chapter adumbrates and critiques the emergence or indeed dominance of policy as numbers in contemporary education policy. The chapter draws out the implications for both education policy and educational research. This analysis is set in the context of globalisation, the rescaling of political authority and the continuing dominance, despite the global financial crisis, of neo- liberal political frameworks. Perhaps ‘re/emergence’ might be more appropriate than emergence, so as to recognise the early twentieth century significance of the ‘political arithmetic’ approach to progressive public administration, particularly within the British tradition, which utilised statistical data very effectively for egalitarian politics; for example, in respect of the extent and location of poverty and the necessary policy interventions to ameliorate it and its effects. We could, of course, look as far back as the founding of sociology, and consider Durkheim's (1894) observation concerning sociological method: ‘The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things’. As Desrosieres (1998, p. 2) suggests, this means we can accept that social facts are things or simply in a methodological sense treat them as if they were things, a distinction I will return to later in this chapter. Another of the founders of sociology, Comte, spoke of positivist sociology as akin to ‘social physics’, a felicitous phrase picking up on all of the ontological and epistemological nuances of such sociology and its conception of the social and society. Additionally, the development of statistics paralleled the emergence of the nation-state as we have come to know it. Professor Richard Selleck's 1988 Radford Lecture dealt with the formation of the Manchester Statistical Society and the related creation of social science research. In that lecture, he showed how the social scientists at the time used the new statistics to put themselves at the service of the powerful and of governments. It is a salutary observation today in respect of policy as numbers, the focus of this chapter, and in respect of the role of social scientists and educational researchers in relation to this phenomenon. I mention political arithmetic, social facts, social physics, statistics and Professor Selleck's Radford Lecture because of my sensitivity to what I see as, using Bourdieu (1998), the almost ‘structural amnesia’ inherent in much social science research and theory, but also linked to my argument that the use of numbers in education policy has taken a new turn and a new significance.

So I am recognising that numbers, statistics, rankings, comparisons, data, etc., have been central to state functioning since the rise of the nation-state in the eighteenth century. These have, through state science and state grids, made the nation ‘legible’ for governing, in Scott's (1998) evocative term. This feature of the modern state is evidenced in the etymology of the word ‘statistics’ and their centrality to the governing practices of the state. My argument, however, is that today policy as numbers has become the reductive norm for contemporary education policy at all levels of rescaled political authority and for new geographies of governance, across local, provincial, national, regional and global fields. Policy as numbers is an exemplification of a policy technology associated with the move from government to governance (Rhodes 1997; Rosenau 1997, 2005). This transition has been framed by the global dominance of neo-liberal politics and policies in the period since the end of the Cold War, signified by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The chapter will also seek to understand these technologies of governance in relation to what Lyotard (1984) called the death of meta-narratives, or what Laidi (1998) refers to as a ‘world without meaning’, a disposition entrenched by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the dominance of global neo-liberalism, and facilitated by new public management and the fiscal necessity of efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of contemporary public policy. Policy as numbers, I will argue, is set against this incredulity towards meta-narratives and lack of an horizon of expectation, a manifestation of what Laidi (1998, p. 7) refers to as the reduction of contemporary politics to ‘managing the ordinary present’ or what Berger (2007) would see as our contemporary inability to imagine a more positive future. Policy as numbers also constitutes the audit culture of neo-liberal governance (Power 1997) and the governmentalities associated with the new individualism endemic in neo-liberalism.

The chapter proceeds in four steps. First, I deal with this phenomenon that I am calling ‘policy as numbers’ framed by politics of/as numbers. I move, secondly, to consider the contemporary ‘structure of feeling’, to use Raymond Williams’ (1966, 1983) felicitous concept, as the backdrop to the rise of policy as numbers in education and its reductive politics. Thirdly, I look at the neo-liberal policy framing of contemporary education policy and policy processes. The effects of policy as numbers as a technology of governance producing new patterns of governmentality in education are next analysed. This policy analysis focuses on education policy developments in the national schooling agenda in Australia as evidence of a policy as numbers approach, and numbers as central to evidence-based policy. The argument will also be that policy as numbers has helped constitute, after Bourdieu (2003), what we might call a ‘global education policy field’. The chapter concludes by briefly considering the implications of my analysis for educational research. Next, though, I turn to what the chapter is not doing.

Excursus

I want to add a brief excursus here on what the chapter is not doing or implying. I am not proffering a critique of quantitative methodologies in educational research or the social sciences. Indeed, I recognise that the research traditions of critical sociology of education and policy sociology in education, that I come out of, are based on multiple quantitative analyses of the socially unjust and unequal functioning of education in relation to the (re)production of inequalities and their legitimation. I also recognise that data have been collected by governments for progressive political purposes, particularly in the period after the Second World War with the creation of the Keynesian welfare state.

Spufford (2010) in his ‘factional’ novel, Red Plenty, satirises the failure and unintended effects of the application of maths and science—the rational mind—in the creation of the Planned Economy in the Soviet Union. In that book a young professor is reflecting on the role of reason:

True, reason was a difficult tool. You laboured with it to see a little more, and at best you got a glimpse, partial truths; but the glimpses were always worth having. True, the new consciously chosen world still had rough edges and very obvious imperfections, but those things would change. This was only the beginning, the day after reason's reign.

(Spufford 2010, p.12)

All social science research gives us glimpses of ‘truth’: derived from both quantitative and qualitative data. The knowledge we produce is thus partial, positioned and provisional, with limitations when applied as an evidence base to policy production (Hammersley 2002). Making nations legible for governing through such evidence and political commitments squeezes out many real life realities and always ensures resistances of various kinds, as Spufford's (2010) novel and Scott's (1998) research on centralised state planning demonstrate.

Additionally, I reject any suggestion that the unhelpful quantitative/qualitative divide parallels, in a homologous fashion, a right/left political divide (Dimitriadis 2008; Kamberelis and Dimitriadis 2005). A wonderful contemporary case in point is Wilkinson and Pickett's (2009) book, The Spirit Level: Why equality is better for everyone, which demonstrates through myriad quantitative and statistical data, and with progressive political intent, the relationship between economic inequalities of multiple kinds (e.g., wealth and income) and inequalities in multiple social domains, including education.

In terms of the quantitative/qualitative binary, Bourdieu's sophisticated theoretical and methodological approaches are a very good exemplification of what I am advocating here: methodology that is complementary to one's onto-epistemologies and the research topic, framed by endemic researcher reflexivity. I would also accept, following Bourdieu (1999), that we must, whatever our methodological approach and its underpinning onto-epistemological assumptions, reject a naive stance of ‘epistemological innocence’ and instead acknowledge the need to reflexively articulate our positioning in data collection of any kind, so as to provide a more transparent and socially scientific account. I am recognising, however, that all social facts derived through research are social constructions—not only social constructions, but social constructions nonetheless— while also representing an extant social reality outside their construction.

Politics of/as numbers

There is an extensive and growing literature about politics of/as numbers, both generally and in education. For analytical purposes we can probably divide this literature into that which deals with the functioning and place of numbers in politics (theoretically and practically) more generally and that which deals with the role of numbers through statistics. Numbers have long been significant to the functioning of the state apparatus. This has been particularly the case since the rise of the nation-state in the late eighteenth century and the parallel development of statistics. As Desrosieres (1998, p. 8) observes: ‘As the etymology of the word shows, statistics is concerned with the construction of the state, with its unification and administration’.

Numbers, including statistics, have thus long been significant technologies of governance. The argument here will be that the governance turn associated with neo-liberalism has enhanced the significance of numbers and statistics as technologies of governance, as central to what Power (1997) calls the rise of the ‘audit society’ and what Neave (1998) has called ‘the evaluative state’. Ozga (2009, p. 150) has observed that:

Data production and management were and are essential to the new governance turn; constant comparison is its symbolic feature, as well as a distinctive mode of operation. As a policy instrument data grew—and continue to grow—in strength, speed and scope. The shift to governance is, in fact, heavily dependent on knowledge and information, which play a pivotal role both in the pervasiveness of governance and in allowing the development of its dispersed, distributed and disaggregated form. Data support and create new kinds of policy instrument that organise political relations through communication/information and hence legitimize the organisation.

Data here can be seen as synonymous with numbers and linked to the rise of the evidencebased policy movement across the public sector (Wiseman 2010). The Economist (2010) captured this enhanced significance of policy as numbers in a special report, ‘The Data Deluge’ (27 February–5 March 2010), which stressed the exponential growth in the availability of data and the significance in this respect of our enhanced digital and computer capacities.

Numbers in politics

In a quite abstract, theoretical, but nonetheless useful way, Appadurai (2006) has written about the ambivalent place of numbers in liberal political theory, while stressing how both numbers and the categories they utilise are important to the actual governance practices of liberal democracies. Numbers thus work both theoretically and practically in politics; that is, they both inform and are technologies of governance: numbers for and as policy.

For Appadurai, there are two important numbers in liberal political theory, namely one and zero. One is important because this integer represents the individual, who lies at the heart of liberalism, with the polity regarded as an aggregation of individuals. The individual is also central to contemporary neo-liberalism. Zero is significant because it is the addition of multiple zeros to the integer one that conjures the concept of the masses. Appadurai goes on to see one and zero, individuals and masses, as each harbouring particular problems for liberal democracy in practice. The masses can be seen in some senses as the denial of the individual, with the potential for fascism and totalitarianism. At the same time, small numbers can be seen to reference elites, oligopolies, minorities. Appadurai (2006, p. 41) also argues that the concepts of majorities and minorities in respect of a nation's demographics are ‘the products of a distinctly modern world of statistics, censuses, population maps, and other tools of state’.

Globalisation has had a significant impact on the nation-state, with significant consequences for numbers, categories and the technologies of governance within the nation. Appadurai's argument is that, in the context of the global and the various cultural flows or ‘scapes’ associated with it (including ‘policyscapes’): ‘The nation-state has been steadily reduced to the fiction of its ethnos as the last cultural resource over which it may exercise full dominion’ (2006, p. 23). It is in this context that the fear of small numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, and the narcissism of minor differences, grows and is fertilised by the paranoid actions of governments, which strengthen a national (rather than...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• World Library of Educationalists series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Situating politics, polices and pedagogies in education
• 1 Policy as numbers: Ac/counting for educational research
• 2 Education policy as numbers: Data categories and two Australian cases of misrecognition
• 3 Policy borrowing, policy learning: Testing times in Australian schooling
• 4 It is and it isn't: Vernacular globalization, educational policy, and restructuring
• 5 New scalar politics: Implications for education policy
• 6 Scottish education: Reflections from an international perspective
• 7 Mediatizing educational policy: The journalistic field, science policy, and cross- field effects
• 8 Deparochializing the study of education: Globalization and the research imagination
• 9 Researching education policy in a globalized world: Theoretical and methodological considerations
• 10 Getting boys' education ‘right’: The Australian Government's Parliamentary Inquiry Report as an exemplary instance of recuperative masculinity politics
• 11 Pedagogies of indifference
• Bibliography
• Index