The contributions in this part of the book cover some of the fundamental analyses of the social role of assessment that have informed a great deal of my later work. In various publications of which these are representative, including my edited collection, Selection, Certification and Control (Broadfoot, 1984), I define the social functions of assessment in terms, broadly, of their historical emergence. The first of these is the assessment of competence which is rooted in the history of craftsmanship and, unsurprisingly, continues today to be most often found in the assessment of vocational education. Second is the advent of assessment for regulating competition for scarce social opportunities as it is mediated through selection based on educational performance.
Third, but less often recognised, is the increasingly important role that educational assessment plays in determining the content of what is taught and hence, the priorities of teachers. It is therefore increasingly being used around the world as a policy tool for directing the curriculum priorities of the educational system as a whole. Fourth, a significant development of recent decades is the use of educational assessment as a means of control through mechanisms of accountability such as payment by results and league tables of comparative performance. Taken together, I argue, these four, generic social functions of educational assessment mediate the relationship between education and society.
The extract from my early book, Assessment, Schools and Society, extends the analysis through the application of some key sociological theories to explore the fundamental dilemmas inherent in the social role of educational assessment. On the one hand it may rightly be seen as a potentially liberating force as the basis for meritocratic selection. On the other, it can be shown to conceal and reinforce the entrenched inequalities embedded in âcultural capitalâ. These analyses illustrate the importance of recognising what I have called âthe myth of measurementâ while, at the same time, of encouraging an appreciation of the benefits of educational assessment. From the late 19th century onwards, as assessment has become an increasingly inextricable feature of educational systems, many leading educationists and policy-makers have deplored its damaging impact. Yet they proved powerless to resist the social utility of a tool that could so effectively provide for and legitimate the regulation of competence and competition.
Thus, the contributions in Part I introduce some of the key theoretical strands that inform the rest of this book. First, and most important, they stress the power of educational assessment to shape both individual lives and the educational project as a whole. Second, Part I highlights the increasing significance of assessment as a policy tool with the power to drive local and national educational priorities. Third, Part I stresses the importance of recognising that the objectivity that is associated with many forms of educational assessment is spurious because such assessment can only ever be a more or less subjective activity which is inevitably affected by the diverse influences on human behaviour. Nevertheless, it is the apparent objectivity of such assessment that provides for its key role in the legitimation of individual life-chances.
1.Competence, competition, content and control: how assessment mediates the relationship between education and society.
Broadfoot, P. (1996) Education, Assessment and Society. Buckingham: Open University Press, Chapters 4 and 5, pp. 66â121.
2.Selection, certification and control: meritocracy or social reproduction?
Broadfoot, P. (1979) Assessment, Schools and Society. London: Methuen, Chapter 4, pp. 84â102.
1Competence, competition, content and control
How assessment mediates the relationship between education and society
Broadfoot, P. (1996) Education, Assessment and Society. Buckingham: Open University Press, Chapters 4 and 5, pp. 66â121.
Introduction
Chapters 2 and 3* set out to examine in detail the part played by educational assessment procedures in helping to shape the organization and ethos of the provision of mass schooling as this has emerged in response to the major changes in the economic and social order brought about by industrialization. This analysis was based on an identification of general trends in assessment procedures in education systems with very different ideological and institutional traditions. The aim was to demonstrate that the determinative role of educational assessment is a feature of the common social and economic pressures such systems are facing at any given time, rather than simply an institutional feature of a particular kind of educational system. However, it is necessary to extend and deepen the analysis beyond simply describing aspects of the relationship between assessment and mass educational provision. There is a need to explore at a more fundamental level the common characteristics of the societies in which formal educational assessment procedures have evolved and, in particular, why it is that educational assessment has so conveniently been able to achieve such incontrovertible legitimation. Thus the analyses of this chapter evoke some of the central themes of sociology in their attempt to identify those characteristics of the transition from feudal to industrial society that may be associated with the rise of educational assessment procedures.
The complex and wide-ranging analysis that follows is directed at an understanding of some of the deepest societal characteristics that underpin the now widespread use of educational assessment procedures in all societies with mass education systems. An attempt is made to understand the role of educational assessment in representing the demands of the instrumental order and of the prevailing ideological basis for social control, and to understand the source of its dual role in opening up avenues for personal liberation and occupational mobility while at the same time playing a key role in social reproduction. The intention is to draw, eclectically, on the common and relevant insights of often contradictory perspectives in addressing a specific question, rather than to undertake the inevitably vain project of seeking to reconcile fundamental divisions in sociological perspective or, equally undesirably, to ignore many valuable insights in seeking to maintain the coherence of a unitary perspective. In particular the analysis focuses on the work of four leading sociological theorists â Weber, Durkheim, Bernstein and Foucault â whose work is taken to be most centrally relevant to the issues in question.
Despite what are often profoundly conflicting perspectives, a number of central issues emerge from the various theoretical perspectives reviewed as the basis for an understanding of the growth of educational assessment. These may be summarized as follows.
1Individualism: instrumental and expressive social functions are now organized on the basis of the individual. Thus both instrumental and expressive legitimating ideologies, the whole basis for social integration and control, are now defined in terms of the individual.
2Rational authority: traditional, coercive authority is replaced by a rational and impersonal (scientific) basis for hierarchical control. This authority increasingly takes the form of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement (i.e. evaluation), which, with the growing dominance of a technological rationality, the individual is increasingly powerless to resist.
3Contradiction and legitimation: despite the carefully concealed power relations underlying the institutions of rational authority, the fundamental irreconcilability between the need to provide for social integration (by âbuyingâ commitment, through economic growth, by âmoral socializationâ, by the arguments of scientific rationality or by disciplinary mechanisms) and the need to maintain inequality leads to a continuing tension, not to say crisis, within capitalist society.
It is because educational assessment is central to all three of these characteristics of capitalist societies that it has become so central to contemporary social organization. In education, as in other areas of social life, the advent of ânormalizing judgementâ makes possible the idea of fixed definitions of competence. This normalizing judgement combines with the idea of âhierarchical observationâ to provide the ârational authorityâ for competition and selection. It will be argued that this Benthamite notion of âpanopticâ surveillance, in which individuals learn to judge themselves as if some external eye was constantly monitoring their performance, encourages the internalization of the evaluative criteria of those in power, and hence provides a new basis for social control. Competence, competition and control will be traced as the characteristic themes of the new disciplinary power that education provides in industrial societies. At the same time, the possibility of individuals and institutions using these same assessment mechanisms to empower creative social action through a more conscious awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses will also be traced as a reflection of the equally profound potential for liberation embodied in the change to a more individualistic society.
The characteristics of industrial society
Assessment has become integrally connected with teaching and learning as we know it in contemporary educational practice simply, yet fundamentally, because in its broadest sense of evaluation â to make reference to a standard â assessment is one of the most central features of the rationality1 that underpins advanced industrial society itself. Assessment procedures are the vehicle whereby the dominant rationality of the corporate capitalist societies typical of the contemporary Western world is translated into the structures and processes of schooling. As Cherkaoui (1977: 162) suggests, the system of assessment that emerged with mass education systems must be understood as âorganically connected with a specific mode of socialisationâ â a mode of socialization in which preparation for a division of labour, bureaucracy and surveillance were dominant characteristics.
Sociologists have been much concerned to conceptualize the difference between âtraditionalâ, âpre-modernâ and âindustrialâ societies. Although varying widely in their perspective on central issues such as the basis for social order, social divisions or the scope for creative social interaction, sociologists spanning the whole range of order versus control and system versus action perspectives (Dawe 1970; Bernstein 1977; Banks 1978) find substantial areas of common ground in their discussion in general terms of the changes in the basis for social institutions which characterized the transition from âtraditionalâ to âindustrialâ societies. Such changes included a number of different social institutions, notably the legal, the religious, the economic, the political and the familial. But, while it is relatively easy to identify associations between the changes that took place in these different social institutions, the attribution of causation is necessarily a good deal more problematic since the emerging nature of industrial society was reflexively related â as both cause and effect of the changing nature of social life.
The changes made necessary by the changing economic order of the industrial revolution were both âpracticalâ and âideologicalâ. Under âpracticalâ would be included the necessity for a mobile workforce in which individuals â not the family or the community â would take responsibility for a particular unit or stage of production, the whole process of which they might not even be able to conceptualize. This was in marked contrast to the hitherto prevailing work organization, in which one individual was typically responsible for the whole task. Given the cost of any long term use of âpower-coerciveâ control strategies (Chin and Benne 1978), it was a âpracticalâ imperative that these new workers should come to accept as quickly as possible the legitimacy of a system in which they were paid a money wage which was only a proportional return for their contribution to a system they were powerless to control.
These changes in the nature of work â its increasing fragmentation and alienation for some, expanding entrepreneurial activities for others â offered and required a degree of geographical and social mobility which brought about associated changes in the familyâs economic and educational role (Coleman 1968). This increase in flexibility and mobility was also increasingly apparent in the ascendancy of Protestantism over Catholicism in many industrializing countries, and in legal innovations based on the right of the individual before an impersonal law which came to replace the old feudal system of reciprocal obligation. Associated with legal developments of this kind were political movements which also had at their centre the idea of liberal democracy: the right of individuals to self-determination (Smith 1980).
These changes reached their apotheosis in the major scientific, religious and political movements which marked the end of the Middle Ages: the Enlightenment, the Reformation and the French Revolution, respectively. Herein lies the link between associated changes in social forms, between the economic base and the social and ideological superstructure.2 Although the profound changes that took place in every aspect of life at this time were legitimized and reinforced by the challenge and, later, the hegemonic domination of a new entrepreneurial class, the most central theme in the changes taking place went far beyond class relations in both its origins and its implications and, for this reason, cannot be neatly categorized as either cause or effect. This was the theme of individualization.3
The change from a predominantly communalist basis for social integration to a more individualist orientation is of crucial importance since it was this new orientation that made possible changes in the whole range of social institutions and legitimating ideologies in the newly industrializing societies. The key to these changes was the growth of a particular kind of rationality. This is the rationality of science, of logic, of efficie...
