Martin Lawn The Rise of Data in Education, 7-10
Mrtin Lawn The Internationalization of Education Data: exhibitions, tests, standards and associations, 11-25
Marcelo Caruso Policing Validity and Reliability: expertise, data accumulation and data parallelisation in Bavaria, 1873 1919, 27-39
Noah W. Sobe Educational Data at Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century International Expositions: ‘accomplished results’ and ‘instruments and apparatuses’, 41-56
Joakim Landahl, Christian Lundahl (Mis-)Trust in Numbers: shape shifting and directions in the modern history of data in Swedish educational reform, 57-78
Ian Grosvenor, Siân Roberts Systems and Subjects: ordering, differentiating and institutionalising the modern urban child, 79-96
Inés Dussel Counting, Describing, Interpreting: a study on early school census in Argentina, 1880-1900, 97-115
Joyce Goodman Visualising Girls’ Secondary Education in Interwar Europe: Amélie Arató’s L’Enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles en Europe, 117-138
Romuald Normand Governing Population: the emergence of a political arithmetic of inequalities in education. A Comparison between the United Kingdom and France, 139-157
Notes on Contributors, 159-160
The Rise of Data in Education
Martin Lawn
Introduction
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The Internationalization of Education Data: exhibitions, tests, standards and associations
Mrtin Lawn
Nation-states and their regions began to produce education data from the mid 1850s or thereabouts, often under pressure from the need to produce data for the World Exhibitions to accompany their displays. The growth of data – its range and depth – began in the twentieth century and reflected breakthroughs in testing and the related complex statistical operations used to manage and understand the resultant data. In some ways, the USA was the leader in this work but when international comparative projects began in the post-war period, newer entrants into the field created the leading edge. Governing education systems began to change and older administrative or agent-based evaluations were dislocated by the arrival of large-scale international surveys.
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Policing Validity and Reliability: expertise, data accumulation and data parallelisation in Bavaria, 1873 1919
Marcelo Caruso
Data becomes particularly ‘informative’ when actors consider validity and reliability as given facts. In this contribution, the disputes over these two dimensions of ‘data’ are credited as being major forces in its exponential growth. In the context of power struggles between emerging professional groups, liberal governance, and cleric school inspectors, the multiplication of data in the Kingdom of Bavaria during the Second Empire was an outcome of challenged legitimacies. This resulted in the parallelisation of processes of data collection and accumulation and, correspondingly, in a major drive towards the growth of data.
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Educational Data at Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century International Expositions: ‘accomplished results’ and ‘instruments and apparatuses’
Noah W. Sobe
This chapter proposes that the education exhibits at international expositions (or world’s fairs) played a significant role in the rise of data in education. Exhibits were carefully executed presentations of a country’s education system and examining this history sheds light on many of the tensions and issues that surround the production and circulation of education data today.
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(Mis-)Trust in Numbers: shape shifting and directions in the modern history of data in Swedish educational reform
Joakim Landahl, Christian Lundahl
In this chapter the authors explore the uses and meanings of data in Swedish educational reform, practice and discourse from roughly the 1940s up to the present day. Their survey covers both national data and international data and includes quantitative as well as qualitative data. They start in the 1940s with two empirical examples that in a way show an antithetical attitude towards data. Travel accounts from America were based on a qualitative approach, and expressed the attitude that the schools studied were important because they were different, modern and inspiring. At roughly the same time, standardised testing was introduced as a technique of connecting the different parts of the school system and rationalising student admission processes. The consequences of this standardisation came under severe attack during the late 1960s and 1970s, resulting eventually in the introduction of a criterion-referenced grading system. Finally, the authors highlight the fact that the last few decades have seen the flourishing of such things as international assessment and school inspection, and there has been an increased emphasis on grades and testing. These examples illustrate that the meanings and techniques of data are objects of a continuous negotiation where sometimes even resistance towards measuring tends to be based on measurements.
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Systems and Subjects: ordering, differentiating and institutionalising the modern urban child
Ian Grosvenor, Siân Roberts
The chapter brings together two aspects of the modern experience: data gathering and the construction of the urban schooled child. It explores the ways in which knowledge about the urban child was created, collected, ordered and enlisted into the service of education (and welfare) policy making. The arguments presented here draw on data about the city of Birmingham, England.
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Counting, Describing, Interpreting: a study on early school census in Argentina, 1880-1900
Inés Dussel
The chapter analyzes the emergence of educational data in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the first educational census from 1883 to 1884 and the institutional history of educational statistics in that country, as well as on the peculiar trajectory of one of its leading figures, Francisco Latzina. Grounding on science studies and histories of statistics, it looks at the categories and narratives that were used in the census and adjacent reports. It presents the history of educational data as an institutional and epistemological production that, while nationally set, was part of an international network that brought forth a new language for understanding and governing education.
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Visualising Girls’ Secondary Education in Interwar Europe: Amélie Arató’s L’Enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles en Europe
Joyce Goodman
This chapter examines the diagrams of education systems in Amélie Arató’s study of girls’ secondary education, published in 1934 as L’Enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles en Europe. The author begins by tracing the strategies Arató employed to organise the comparative data in her account. She locates Arató’s use of visual representation in the context of the rise of educational and information sciences and their link to the practices of interwar cooperative internationalism at the International Bureau of Education in Geneva, which Arató visited in 1931 during the course of her research. The chapter concludes by discussing the contradictions inherent in Arató’s use of visualisations in a project to ‘progress’ education for women and girls; and the author concludes by pointing to the complexities of international comparative data for policy purposes in education.
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Governing Population: the emergence of a political arithmetic of inequalities in education. A Comparison between the United Kingdom and France
Romuald Normand
Based on a comparative perspective between the United Kingdom (UK) and France, the chapter explores an important historical period in the quantification of inequalities in education. It starts with a presentation of the genesis and the development of the UK political arithmetic of inequalities embedded in a eugenic orthodoxy and issues of population policy and politics. It shows how some tools and concepts have travelled from psychology to sociology and then from the UK to France. The explanation for the increase in data cannot be separated from considerations about the extension of the Welfare State, searching for a compromise between economical effectiveness and social justice. The reader is invited to discover some links between science and politics, and the role of policy borrowing and knowledge transfer in the building of quantitative sociology of education as a discipline and science of government.
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Notes on Contributors
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