The Neoliberal Way of Quantifying and Reforming Educational Systems: Towards a Genealogy of Quality in Economics of Education

André Martins, University of São Paulo

The rise of quantification studies has shed light on the mutually constitutive relationship between forms of quantification and modes of government. One interesting strand of research is concerned with the specificities of neoliberal regimes of calculation: would there be neoliberal forms of quantification? In this paper, I contribute to this debate covering the history of different modes of measuring quality of education in Economics of Education. I start the analysis with OECD’s educational planning initiative - Mediterranean Regional Project (1961) - and its considerations on educational quality. I then take the Coleman Report (1966) as a turning point of educational quality debate, analyzing how its educational production function fostered different meanings of educational quality. These new measures of quality played an important role in the development of a neoliberal reasoning in education, well summarized in the project Making Schools Work (1994). The analysis draws attention to the mutually constitutive dynamics between quantification and modes of government that made it possible to reformulate the notion of educational quality. This dynamics embraces, on the one hand, the ways in which the measuring of quality of education responded to interests conceived in scientific, political and economic spheres; on the other hand, the process in which different measures of quality of education underpinned other values and meanings that changed the public debate on education. Tracing a history of neoliberal critique of input-based perspectives on educational quality, this paper suggests that the rise of student performance indicators and the ordinalization phenomenon, well-illustrated by the ascension of rankings, have been articulated to the ascension of audit cultures in education, an expression of neoliberal aim to transform markets in a site of veridiction for governmental practice.

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 Presented in Session 144. Economic and Ideological Underpinnings of Higher Education