Elastic numbers: national examinations data as a technology of government

Abstract

This article is motivated by interest in the deployment of massive numerical information produced by national examinations in the practices of control and steering. It examines how data generated in the compulsory school graduation examination in the Russian Federation connect together different actors within the education system and beyond, and the nature of the relationships so formed. These questions take as their unit of analysis the relations and relationships created and/or re-ordered through numbers, and they unmask who utilizes the numerical data, and for what purpose. The article brings together two major arguments in the existing literature on quantification, and develops them further into a coherent research framework which is then applied to capture and interpret the circulation and application of the examinations data. The first argument suggests that governance by numbers, characteristic of contemporary regulation practices, relies on and promotes the parallel existence of soft and hard regimes of regulation. The second addresses the increasingly public nature of social statistics, that is, its circulation on both official and popular levels. The article illustrates that it is by means of analysing the overlappings and interdependencies between the soft and hard regimes, and the two levels of data entry, that we can best understand how numbers exercise power and how they become rooted and gain more power in the process.

Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-liberal: Governing Russian schools through quality assurance and evaluation

“…Its main goals were claimed to be greater equality through facilitating all school-leavers' access to higher education, and making the quality of school education greater, even across the country. By fostering compliance with the official school curricula, the USE facilitated the re-centralization of school education governance (Piattoeva, 2015). Another strong argument in favour of the USE concerned its role in producing 'impartial' and informed evidence for policy.…”

Quality of Education and Its Evaluation: An Analysis of the Russian Academic Discussion

“…The authors who wrote in the 1990s appear as antistatist in the sense that they wanted the schools to receive, to a greater or lesser extent, full freedom of operation. However, the ongoing reconsolidation of state power through evaluation (see Piattoeva, 2015) is largely supported in many recent academic discussions that moved from exploring school-level management to evaluation of the national education system as a whole.…”

“…Data collection redefines practices through the logic of "what is counted, counts," especially when evaluation processes bear high stakes for the evaluated persons and institutions through redistribution of funds or recruitment decisions. Equally, the processes of data collection as mandated by the authorities contribute to building or strengthening hierarchies and unequal power relations between those who assemble the data and those who are acted upon as data (Piattoeva, 2015;Selwyn, Henderson, & Chao, 2015). Quality assurance procedures increasingly involve self-evaluation practices which, while seemingly permissive and self-initiated, still have to stay in line with the prescribed indicators and central standards, and put emphasis on constant self-regulation and self-improvement (Lawn & Grek, 2012, p. 146).…”

“…Yet another tool is provided by the public nature of evaluation results, which now appear in diverse rankings, ratings, and reports publicized in and often prepared by commercial media for the purpose of modulating everyday decisions and actions of the consumers of educational services. This development can be viewed as empowering a certain privileged category of citizens as political subjects who are expected to influence educational institutions by means of rational and informed consumer choice (for more discussion on media-assisted, data-driven governing from afar, see Piattoeva, 2015).…”

“…Developed as a tool for measuring educational achievement and a means to ensure more equal access to higher education, the USE gradually became a major instrument for measuring overall education quality and ensuring compliance with the official school curricula (Piattoeva, 2015;Tyumeneva, 2013). It shifted attention to measurable outcomes and efficiency, signaling the introduction of an output-based curriculum in Russia, and facilitated the centralization of school education governance.…”